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ORU HISTORY & HUMANITIES MODERN WORLD - READER I 1600 - 1850

Gary K. Pranger, Editor

1 THE MODERN WORLD I 1600-1850

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE 5 1. INTRODUCTION AND GENERAL OVERVIEW 7 2. TIME LINE 3. THE RENAISSANCE Gary K. Pranger 12 4. THE REFORMATION Gary K. Pranger 20 5. RESTORATION & GLORIOUS REVOLUTION Harold Paul & Gary K. Pranger 46 6. EUROPE AND FRANCE 1600-1715 J. Franklin Sexton & Gary K. Pranger 54 7. NEOCLASSICAL LITERATURE David Ringer 80 8. THE ENLIGHTENMENT Gary K. Pranger 90 9. THE LASTING SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT L. Lee Peterson & Gary K. Pranger 96 10. THE GERMAN EMPIRE AFTER 1648: PRUSSIA & AUSTRIA Gary K. Pranger 113 11. 18TH CENTURY STATE COMPETITION 1713-1763 J. Franklin Sexton 132 12. ECONOMICS & HISTORY Gary K. Pranger 136 13. MARX & MARXISM: IDEAL AND REALITY 148 14. THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY NOVEL Carl Hamilton 157 15. METHODISM Harold J. Paul 163 16. THE FIRST GREAT AWAKENING Gary K. Pranger 176 17. GREAT BRITAIN & THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 1763-1815 J. Franklin Sexton & Gary K. Pranger 191 18. THE COMING OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION J. Franklin Sexton 207 19. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION J. Franklin Sexton & Gary K. Pranger 216

20. LIBERALISM & NATIONALISM: REVOLUTIONS 1830 & 1848 Gary K. Pranger 246 21. GREAT BRITAIN 1780-1914 Gary K. Pranger 257 22. IMPERIALISM Gary K. Pranger 269

2 23. RUSSIA: ITS ORIGINS TO 1914 Gary K. Pranger & Alan Repko 283

ROMANTICISM AND EARLY 19TH CENTURY

24. BEETHOVEN, MAN AND HIS MUSIC Gretchen Ervin 300 25. AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH ROMANTICISM: WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE Carl Hamilton 310 26. ENGLISH ROMANTIC POETS Gretchen Ervin 322 27. MUSIC OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD Evelyn Davis 334 28. THE RENAISSANCE OF AMERICAN LITERATURE Robert Spiller 344 29. NINETEENTH CENTURY RUSSIAN NOVELS Douglas Gronberg 360 30. NINETEENTH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVELS Robert Voight 371 31. HUMANITIES AS WORLD HISTORY GKP 383 32. CHINA: ANCIENT TIMES TO 1644 Gary K. Pranger 387 33. CHRISTIAN MISSIONS HISTORY TO 1916 GKP 401 34. “ISMS” GKP 413

3 PREFACE

This work of historical engagement is unique in a number of ways. First, it unabashedly and unashamedly takes an evangelical-charismatic Christian world-view.

We hope to balance out the biases and propaganda of the “City of Man” by not excluding the “City of God” and by admitting that the latter is the most wholistic and realistic of the different world-views as we introduce students to their world. Students are meant to be building their own worldviews as well as their ethical identity and awareness.

Two, it is an adaptive or elastic text that can be added to or subtracted from, improved, corrected and amended. Three, it is a multi-authored work where different professionals contributed pieces over the years. Many were meant to contribute but the general editor found it necessary to contribute heavily to this first edition not because he thinks of himself as an expert on all areas but because it was simply time for this text to be implemented and placed on the world wide platform that ORU has established with the “Faculty Showcase.” Fourth, it has been a dream of many historians to do a textbook and so this really had its inception in the hearts and minds of the original architects of the original Humanities courses at ORU. These original architects, particularly, J. Franklin

Sexton envisioned and forged a fully orbed four course Humanities curriculum that covered the beginning of civilization until now. Thus, originally, many of the pieces in this text were printed lectures that went along with video lectures for the course that was called Humanities 213.

These materials and the general outline of the topics were and still are excellent and none of the power or original intent was lost even as they were updated and edited for this text. Thus, many of the original teachers of humanities at ORU are raised again to

4 life and renewed and celebrated in this present form. However, this is now meant to be for students anywhere in the world to understand basic history and to help history students whether at ORU or somewhere else in the world to understand our perspectives.

Many acknowledgements need to be made here. This text is dedicated to the memories of Harold J. Paul and J. Franklin Sexton as the two founders and chairmen of the ORU History and Humanities department. Further heartfelt thanks goes to Ruth

Sexton, David Ringer, John W. Swails, Bill Collier, Sonny Branham, and Paul Vickery for their assistance, editorial help, encouragement and contributions. A special thanks goes to Beverly Garrison who read through the text thoroughly and told me exactly what she thought.

5 GENERAL OVERVIEW

Our study of World history is meant to offer a free environment in which to consider and develop one’s own worldview and image of man. This text divides the subject into the periods 1) 1500-1715, 2) 1715-1815, 3) 1800- 1850, 4) 1850-1914, 5) 1900-to the present. During the first two periods man’s reason was exalted and in the third man’s intuitive nature reined supreme. In the fourth era realism, humanism and secularism began to dominate. The fifth is titled by the concepts of Modernism, 1900-1970’s, and Post-Modernism, 1970’s to now. Many highly creative intellects sought to separate reality and knowledge from that of the Christian account over time. During the Medieval (475-1500) and Reformation (1500-1650) periods civilization and Christianity were essentially synthesized. Christian and Humanistic scholars influenced by Christianity had begun to examine every aspect of the culture as it developed and offered holistic answers to the important questions of life. This Christian scholarship continued to build up alongside of the rise of secular society and culture and often times was interfused with it as Western civilization developed. Despite new challenges, the Holy Spirit continued to move and Christianity continued to grow. From the time of the “Middle Ages” (475-1500) and scholasticism man’s reason and faith in God were questioned and separated, which caused many Christian scholars to analyze their faith and knowledge. An earlier phase of the Enlightenment, usually dated from 1650 to 1715, could be said to have begun in the period called the Renaissance (1300-1527) and had by 1650 incorporated many scholars who still considered themselves to be Christians and/or retained a Christian worldview. Thus science, politics, society and culture were based on a Christian worldview. Francis Bacon worked on the basis of this Christian world-view but as he emphasized “empiricism,” and inductive reasoning – these new scientific methods helped others separate the Creator from the Creation, and intellectuals and scholars increasingly called faith into question against the acceptance of a more secular scientific reasoning. The Enlightenment, as a reform movement, did do many good things and questioned many things that should have been questioned. However, the Enlightenment thinkers, especially in France, blamed the Christian Church for many of the wrongs and mistakes in Western Civilization and thus rejected Christianity altogether. However, the period between 1500 and 1850 also tells the story of the Reformation of Christianity and then the undermining of the Christian consensus that led to an acceptance of a secular humanism which then defined what reality, truth and values were for society in the twentieth century. As an increasingly secular world emerged and was embraced there was an increasing hunger for spiritual answers to existence, for meaning in life and for solutions to life’s problems. By the twentieth century this hunger revealed itself and caused many to attempt to find meaning in the world’s philosophies and religions; and in drugs, sex, and the occult. Nevertheless, a large body of believers maintained the stream of vital faith and piety in the only God and creator of all things; in Jesus Christ and his substitutionary atonement for the fallenness and sin in all mankind. It is only through belief in Christ that one can be saved. The Holy Spirit then works for the discipleship of those who

6 believe as well as carrying out God’s purposes throughout history. God works out His purposes through the saved and unsaved, and in every detail and happening through time. Words, terms and the material world may have changed but the reality and the truth that are taught in the Bible have remained the same throughout the time of man’s history to the very present. Romanticism is the second part of this unit and it is considered an historic period coming on the heels of the Enlightenment time. The Enlightenment is thought to be roughly from 1650 to 1800. The Romantic period begins with the French Revolution and 1800 and runs roughly until the 1850’s. Romanticism was in many ways a reaction to the Enlightenment and tended to go a different direction. Where the Enlightenment was urban, Romanticism was rural – countryside oriented. Where the Enlightenment lifted up society and social values as the way to determine one’s values and ethics, Romantics turned to the individual and found values and ethics in “Nature.” Where the Enlightenment thinkers looked at the world and the universe as a machine, Romantics saw the world and the universe as an organic whole, like plants and trees. Nature ruled. Where the Enlightenment saw God as a deistic force creating the world and the universe with laws but retreating from it to let it all run itself, including man, Romanticism saw God as a pantheistic force residing in Nature and in the intuitive nature of every man and woman. Romanticism produced some of the most enjoyable poetry, novels, art and music that still influence much of our thinking and the arts today. It needs to be understood here that history really is a story of individual lives who worked alone or with others to produce what we call history. Some make it into “the story” and many do not. The “main characters” of history usually have important episodes that are remembered, revered and which create scholarly or legendary stereotypes of these people when in fact these same individuals live on in their time and even change their minds about the very things they were famous for. But their scholarly or legendary stereotypes live on. Each individual is unique and the history of each individual life is impossible to comprehend with the whole. Thus, the student of history must understand that historians and written history is always selective and in some way biased in producing the story that is being conveying to the reader. The only one who sees the story of history in its entirety and comprehends the depths of every life down to the atom and molecule is God. Thus, God is the great historian and indeed He is sovereign over this whole epic and it may be trully said that this is His story…that all mankind and the whole universe should give him the glory, praise, and honor due Him.

TIMELINE

MIDDLE AGES 475-1527 – ITALIAN RENAISSANCE 1357-1527- REFORMATION 1517-1650

1304-1374 Petrarch - Humanism Founder 1320-1384 John Wycliffe produced first English Bible in 1380. 1455 Johannes Gutenberg completes technology for moveable typesetting and printing 1473-1543 Nicolaus Copernicus 1492 Columbus discovers America 1509-1564 John Calvin 1517 Martin Luther posts 95 Theses 1519-1521 Cortez conquers Aztecs n Mexico 1520-22 Magellan & Elcano complete first circumnavigation of the world. 1529 Parliament accepts Henry XIII’s Reformation & Protestant Church of England 1531-1533 Pizarro conquers Incas in Peru 1532 John Calvin leads Reformation in France 1533-34 Henry XIII head of Church of England; France declares Protestants heretics; Loyola founds Jesuits; Anabaptists capture Munster, Westphalia 1535 Sir Thomas More, English Humanist executed 1536-64 Calvin leads Reformation in Geneva 1543 Copernicus publishes On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres; Modern Astronomy founded 1545-63 Council of Trent- Catholics & Protestants recognize distinctive theologies 1555 Peace of Augsburg – Catholics & Protestants confirm Reformation claims 1561-1626 Francis Bacon 1564-1642 Galileo Galilei 1571-1630 Johannes Kepler 1588-1679 Thomas Hobbes 1596-1650 Descartes 1562-1598 French Wars of Religion 1600 Thomas Helwys establishes first Baptist Church 1600-1661 Samuel Rutherford published Lex Rex 1644 1603-1625 James I – Stuarts Established – 1611 Sponsor’s King James Version of the Bible for Church of England 1620 Pilgrims and William Bradford found Plymouth Plantation in the New World 1625 Cornelius Jansen 1625-1649 Charles I in England 1630 Puritans and John Winthrop found Boston, Massachusetts 1631-1704 John Locke 1632-1732 Christopher Wren – English Architect of London 1638-1715 Louis XIV reigns in France 1642-1649 English Civil War, Charles I Executed 1621-1727 Isaac Newton 1648 Peace of Westphalia ends the era of Reformation Religious Warfare

ENLIGHTENMENT ERA 1650-1815 ROMANTIC ERA 1800-1850 1648-1706 Pierre Bayle - Enlightenment proponent of total religious and intellectual freedom 1649-1660 Oliver Cromwell – Lord Protector forges modern “Great Britain” 1659-1731 Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe 1650’s John Milton, John Bunyan, John Owen 1660 Restoration of the King in England 1660-1685 Charles II and the Restoration in England 1670 Pascal publishes Pensees 1675 Philip Jakob Spener, Pia Desideria 1681 William Penn, a Quaker, founds Pennsylvania 1684- 1721 Antoine Watteau 1685-88 James II 1685-1759 George Friedrich Handel 1687 Newton’s The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (or Principia Mathematica) 1688 Glorious Revolution in England 1688-1725 William & Mary, Lex Rex 1689-1761 Samuel Richardson 1694-1778 Voltaire, publishes Letters on the English, 1733 1698 August Hermann Franke opens first orphanage in Halle 1703-1791 John Wesley 1707-1754 Henry Fielding 1708 Alexander Mack founds Church of the Brethren 1711-1776 David Hume 1712-1778 Rousseau 1714-1770 George Whitefield 1722 Count Zinzendorf founds Herrnhut community 1723-1794 John Witherspoon, Scottish Presbyterian, becomes President of Princeton 1724-1804 Kant 1725-1807 John Newton, Slave trader turned Christian 1740-1814 Marquis de Sade 1743-1826 Thomas Jefferson 1744-1803 Johann Gottfried Herder 1749-1831 Goethe 1757-1827 William Blake 1758-1794 Robespierre 1759-1833 William Wilberforce 1760-1846 Thomas Clarkson 1762 Rousseau’s Social Contract 1769-1821 Napoleon 1770-1827 Beethoven 1770-1831 Hegel 1772-1834 Samuel Taylor Coleridge

9 1776-1837 Constable 1776 Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations published 1776-1783 American Revolution, Declaration of Independence 1776, Constitution, 1789 1770-1850 William Wordworth 1780-1845 Elizabeth Fry 1788-1824 Lord Byron 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, French Revolution begins 1789-1791 National Constituent Assembly 1792-1794 The Reign of Terror in France 1795-1821 John Keats 1797-1875 Charles Lyell 1801-1855 Lord Schaftsbury 1803-1882 Ralph Waldo Emerson 1804-1872 Feuerbach 1804-1864 Nathaniel Hawthorne 1807 English Slave Trade Ended 1809-1882 Charles Darwin 1813-1883 Richard Wagner 1812-1870 Charles Dickens 1813-1855 Kierkegaard 1817-1862 Henry David Thoreau 1818-1848 Emily Bronte 1818-1883 Karl Marx 1819-1877 Gustave Courbet 1819-1891 Herman Melville 1819-1892 Walt Whitman 1820-1903 Herbert Spencer 1822-1895 Louis Pasteur 1830-1886 Emily Dickenson 1833 Slavery ended in Great Britain and the British Empire 1840-1926 Claude Monet 1841-1919 Pierre-August Renoir 1851 Herman Melville’s Moby Dick published 1859 Darwin’s Origin of Species published

10 THE RENAISSANCE

Gary K. Pranger

HUMANISM

Humanism comes from the Latin for “humanitas” or humanity and came to be the word used for the study of all things human. In Italy this humanism became a resurgence or “renaissance” in the study of classical antiquity. In schools and universities the important subjects were grammar, rhetoric, poetics, and the literature of antiquity so as to imitate its style and this was thought to be an innovation. Here grew the idea that learning and scholarship were done simply for the love and enjoyment of it in and of itself. The “superior” knowledge of the humanists found expression in the critique of scholasticism that depended on the interpreters of original documents and ignored the study of original sources, Latin authors and style. Renaissance humanism was stimulated by the Neo-Platonism of scholars migrating from Byzantium as Islam took over Asia

Minor and much of Southwest Europe. Manuel Ehrysoloras Bessarion taught Greek and established the Platonic Academy at Florence in 1440.

Renaissance humanists advocated the unhampered intellectual development of man, who was considered able to perfect himself through the study of classical literature.

Petrarch (1304-74) was by far the earliest to stress this need for classical studies and he developed a new poetic style. He was familiar with the theologian Augustine, whom

Reformation fathers later valued, but also the Roman philosophers Seneca and Cicero.

He sought the “wisdom of the enlightened heathen” to develop intellect and soul, and to renew the mission of Rome and Italy in pastoral solitude. His friend Boccaccio (1313-

75) in his Decameron composed the first modern short story collection. Leonardo Bruni

11 in the Cicero Novus published in Florence in 1415 conveyed the ideal of the cultured and simultaneously politically active individual. Ficino (1433-99) was a physician who took up interpreting Plato and he advocated a religion of aesthetics believing that God is the expression of true beauty. Pico della Mirandola (1433-99) projected the concept of the world based on Christian, classical and Jewish cultural values. The first Roman Catholic

Papal humanists around Pope Nicholas V (1447-55) founded the Vatican Library at

Rome. His secretary Lorenzo Valla (1405-57) introduced philological humanism by the critical study of ancient texts and Scripture and the comparing of the Vulgate (The

Roman Catholic Bible) with the original Greek text that Jerome had used. This method proved that the so called “Donation of Constantine” was a forgery. Students, printers,

Italian clerics and diplomats disseminated humanism throughout Europe. The University of Prague was established in 1348 and it influenced the development of German humanism.

German humanism was characterized by its Christian earnestness that utilized classical and early Christian writings to deepen understanding of life and religious and educational concerns. Rudolf Agricola worked to reform Latin schools. The new learning captured almost all of the universities by 1500. John Reuchlin (1455-1522) promoted the study of Greek and Hebrew and was a critic of the Roman Catholic Church and the Reformation in his satirical Letters of Obscure Men. Philip Melanchthon became the “Praeceptor Germaniae” as he (1497-1560) created the humanisitic “Gymnasium” – the equivalent of what would become elementary, high school, and pre college education that taught Lutheran doctrine, humanism, German traditions and culture. German humanism created a “national orientation” as outstanding works of German literature

12 were discovered and collected that awakened feelings of a national consciousness. So while a politically unfied Germany was still 300 years into the future, German culture began to unify German people through their culture and language throughout what had been a politically fragmented part of Europe. Attempts were made through historical scholarship to put down accusations that Germans were nothing but barbarians and the

German past was nothing but barbarism. Thus, Celtus edited the first edition of Tacitus.

Jacob Wimpfeling (1450-1528) composed the first German historical study in 1505.

Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523) struggled against the abuses of the Roman Catholic

Church and Curia and he pushed for a new German empire.

The Netherlands provided for a very cosmopolitan atmosphere for humanistic scholars. Desiderius Erasmus (1467-1536) from Rotterdam became Europe’s most renowned scholar and he worked for a compromise between the humanistic spirit and

Christian faith and piety. He was a critic of both Roman Catholic abuses and

Reformation excesses and composed a famous satirical account called In Praise of Folly.

His scholarly work found its climax in his own Greek edition of the New Testament in

1516. Many neo-Latin poets, translators and historians found a safe haven for their pursuits in the Netherlands.

In England the “New Learning” spread from Oxford University. John Colet (d.

1519) founded St. Paul’s School in London and Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) wrote

Utopia which was modeled on Plato’s Republic about the ideal state. Both Colet and

More were close friends with Erasmus. English literature flowered under humanism with the works of Edmund Spencer and dramatists Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593), Ben

Johnson, and John Webster. However, William Shakespeare from Stratford-on-Avon

13 (1564-1616) is the most remembered humanist playright composing numerous tragedies, comedies, histories, and sonnets.

In France the studia humanitatis became a firm part of tradition by the end of the 15th century. Robert Gaguin introduced Plato and resurrected the importance of Rome and

Gaul - the name for France in Ancient times. Jacques Lefevre translated the Greek New

Testament into French. Guillaume Bude, the scholar of Graecism (all things Greek) established the College of France and the Bibliotheque Nationale. Rabelais (1495-1553) became renowned as a satirist writing Gargantua and Pantagruel in the witty, biting style reminiscent of the Romans. Michel de Montaigne (1533-92), a famed moralist, invented the genre of “the essay.” French humanists strove as always for the purity of the national language.

Humanism began as educated scholars who were still conscious of their Christianity, and their studies defended the true faith against all that was false or hypocritical.

However, as the Renaissance followed the Reformation into the late 1500’s and early

1600’s there was a pronounced “turning to the world” and thus it changed attitudes towards life fundamentally from the “pilgrim to the heavenly home” to man as “creator and ruler of the world.” Castiglione (1478-1529), a writer, created the image of the

“uomo universale” – the universally educated, great individual, who knows himself at one in beautiful harmony with nature and “is able to accomplish whatever he wills.” This ideal affected the conception of “the gentleman” throughout European society. This breakthrough to the discovery of man and the world was most strongly expressed in art.

The example of antiquity was to encourage artisitic integrity and to surpass antiquity was to be the highest aim. The ground for all of this was prepared for during the 14th century

14 by artists like Giotto and Giovanni Pisano and patronized by the city republics of Venice,

Florence, Milan, the Este family, and the Popes.

The “early” Renaissance from the 1300’s to 1500 was so designated by its exploratory neo-classical art, literature, and translation work. During the 16th century intensification of all the arts led to the “High Renaissance” and after 1530 further developments led to the “Mannerism” of the “Late Renaissance.”

Architecture was an adoption of classical forms: barrel vaults, round arches, and domed central structures. A new concept of space was illustrated by stress on vertical lines with balanced proportions. This included the development of the three storied

Italian city palace with structured façade, interior courts and arched promenades. Pope

Julius II commissioned the construction of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome in 1506. This project saw the participation of Bramante (1444-1514), Raphael, Peruzzi, and

Michelangelo (1475-1564).

Sculpture using examples from antiquity brought about the “rediscovery of the human body.” Numerous figures were produced in the round: busts, statues of nobles on horseback, and tomb memorials. Ghiberti gave direction to the movement along with his pupil Donatello (1386-1466), and Michelangelo who produced significant statues of

“David” and “Moses.”

Painting strove for the ideal natural beauty and this led to the development of

“perspective,” the observation of anatomical proportions, the technique of portrait painting, especially oils, and the works of “fresco” painting. Religously inspired works dominated early in the Renaissance particularly the paintings of Masaccio, Fra Angelico,

Domenico Veneziano. Many masterpieces were produced by Sandro Botticelli (1444-

15 1510), Raphael Santi (1483-1520) who specialized in Madonnas, Michelangelo famous for the Last Judgement, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), famous for the Last Supper and

Mona Lisa along with his writings on art, and Titian (1477-1576).

Music adapted polyphonic vocal music (the mass, the motet) to instruments (the lute, the cembalo) and from this pure instrumental music developed. Masters of the classical imitative style were Orlando di Lasso (1532-94) and Palestrina (1525-94).

THE LATE GOTHIC IN EUROPE

Italian artists were financed or “commissioned” by nobles throughout Europe. For example Francis I of France commissioned Leonardo Da Vinci. Likewise European artists were fiananced when artists, like Albrecht Durer, went to Italy to study. However, the Renaissance did not spread to the rest of Europe until the 16th century and, so, late

Gothic styles remained in use. The princely palace and residence took the place of the castle and “the artist” freed himself from the ties of artisans who still maintained schools of painters, dome builders, plasterers, engravers, sculptors, and masons.

In Germany the bourgeois character of the period was reflected in the urban patrician homes and city halls, some built of lath and plaster with bays, staircases and clock towers as in Nuremberg, and Rothenburg. City halls and palaces were built after the Italian model – especially in southern Germany as in the Heidelberger Schloss during the so- called Weser Renaissance around 1600. The realism of traditional German woodcarving and painting was intensified in works such as altar decorations, especially in the Cologne school. The period found its fulfillment in the “last artist of the Gothic” in Matthias

Grunewald (d. 1528) of Wurzburg who created the Isenheim Altar-piece. Albrecht Durer

(1471-1528) combined Late Gothic tradition and German feeling with the Italian

16 viewpoint. Utilizing perspective and proportion he became the teacher of a new generation of painters and engravers with his self-portraits, religious tableaux, water- color landscapes, woodcuts, copperplate engravings and etchings. Italian influence is also evident in the portraits of Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1553), the paintings of

Albrecht Altdorfer and the drawings of Lukas Cranach the Elder. A flowering of sculpture was reflected in the Franconian carved altars of Tilman Riemenschneider (d.

1531), and the work of the Nurembergers: Veit Stoss, Adam Kraft and Peter Vischer.

In the Netherlands there was a grand unfolding of the “soft style” of realistic mood painting as in many early portraits and landscapes. Important here were the van Eyck brothers who produced the Altar-piece in Ghent in 1432. In France the Late “Flamboyant

Gothic” produced a concealed architectural form in a wealth of decorative features.

There was also a brief flowering of Renaissance architecture in the Loire chateaux of

Francis I and in Paris in the work of Lescot – on a wing of the Louvre from 1556-1564 and on the façade of the Tuileries that began in 1564. In painting there was a transition from the minature style to the tableau of Jean Fouquet (d. 1481) and the “school of the

Loire.” In England there was an indigenous development of Gothic in the “Perpendicular style” from 1350 to 1530 in fan vaults, flat arches, and vertical decorations. This style became fused with Renaissance influences and it became the “Tudor style” before 1600, especially in the art and architecture of Hampton Court.

In art history books and tours of Europe today one can still see and enjoy much vitality of the Renaissance in historic buildings and in many very interesting museums.

17 QUESTIONS: 1) What does ‘Humanism’ mean? Did Renaissance humanism exclude or include that which was Christian? Explain. Give examples of some scholars in this period and what they did, believed and taught? 2) What distinguishes the Renaissance from other periods of history? How did it come about and how did it influence Europe? 3) What are the different styles of art, and architecture in late Medieval Europe and during the Renaissance into the 16th century?

FURTHER READING:

Robert Clouse. Two Kingdoms: The Church and Culture Through the Ages. Chicago:

Moody Press, 1993.

P. Collinson. The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559-1625

(1982).

53 EUROPE & FRANCE 1600-1715: THE AGE OF LOUIS XIV

J. Franklin Sexton and Gary K. Pranger

In 1648, the Peace of Westphalia, a momentous treaty, ended the 30 Years War – a period of 3 wars involving Counter-Reformation Catholic political and religious objectives and Protestant Calvinist recognition and political objectives throughout all of

Europe. In religious terms, it confirmed a previous religious treaty, the Peace of

Augsburg (1555), that would include Roman Catholic toleration and recognition of

Calvinists as well as Lutherans in their respective regions in Europe. 1624 was considered to be the determining time for all ecclesiastical land changes between

Reformers and Catholics. The treaty made at Westphalia also established that the

Catholic Holy Roman Emperor would retain his privileges (laws, treaties and powers) only on conditional approval of the Imperial Diet. This was called the Reichstag after

1663 and became a permanent diet of aristocratic delegates. The Emperor retained full sovereignty over his lands. All the European nations that were involved received some objectives or land they wanted. Also, Sweden, Bavaria, Brandenburg, Switzerland and the Netherlands left the empire and became Protestant nations.

The significance of the Treaty of Westphalia is that it was the beginning of a long process of secularizing state governments because they allowed for religious toleration.

Protestant nations tended to be the most tolerant and Catholic nations the least tolerant.

The danger of Habsburg (The Holy Roman Empire) hegemony in Europe was eliminated. Other powers rose to great power status in France, Sweden, the United

Provinces (The Netherlands). In Germany, the Holy Roman Empire’s power disintegrated into a confederation of many kingdoms, duchies, and free city states that

54 made up Germany and the “German liberties” of the princes prevailed. Because

Germany was so fragmented, it became impotent militarily and politically. The

Habsburgs dominated Austria and was separated from the rest of the German Empire.

Spain was at its height of power from 1492 to1588. When Sir Francis Drake and the

English navy and a series of storms defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588, Spain’s hegemony over Western Europe declined. In 1590 Spain interfered in the French

Huguenot War which pitted Protestants against Catholics. However, French nationalism resisted the intrusion. Protestant England and the Dutch Republic joined the battle against the Spanish. In 1595 Spain and France fought another war and in 1598 with the

Peace of Vervins, Spain abandoned all interference in the affairs of France. Phillip III

(1598-1621) left the management of the exhausted Spain to his favorite, Count Lerma, the “greatest thief of Spain.” In 1610 the unscrupulous expulsion of the Moriscos (Moors or Muslims) completely destroyed the land’s prosperity. Under Philip IV (1621-1665) and the Duke Olivares (1621-1643) Spain participated in the 30 Year’s War and the renewal of war with the Dutch but all this weakened Spain. Portugal defected and was detached from Spain in 1640. In 1648 the Peace of Westphalia recognized the freedom of the Protestant Netherlands from Spain and thus Spain lost its predominant power position in Europe to France by the 1659 Peace of the Pyrenees.

As England’s Constitutional Monarchy was unique in all of Europe, Absolute

Monarchy was the prevailing form of government. However, as the Enlightenment age went from 1648-1750, protestant ministers and secular philosophes would succeed in teaching some of the European kings to be more humane, practical, organized and fair in

55 their handling of their peoples and thus a third term came into vogue – Enlightened

Monarchy.

SOCIAL TRENDS

Generally, throughout Europe three classes existed in 1) The Aristocracy or Nobility,

2) the Middle Class, and 3) the Peasant Class. The Aristocrats or Nobles were heirs of power, knighthood, wealth, land by aristocratic family and connections. They were the

“Nobility of the Sword” who back in the Middle Ages were the Knights and Lords of the

Manor who defended the other classes and garnered their loyalty and services. In this time they had become simply the rich and no longer did the fighting. The Middle Class emerged from the peasant class as they became skilled workers, merchants, craftsmen, and townspeople. Some of these people became part of the bureaucracy and civil service of their governments especially as Louis XIV used them and other countries copied his ways.

The Peasant class, the majority of any nation at this time, was made up of skilled and unskilled labor in agriculture primarily. But the new factories drew them to the cities and towns. They were called the “proletariat.”

In France, the class structure was made up of 1) The First Estate, the Nobility, 2) the

Second Estate, the Clergy, and 3) the Third Estate, the middle class and the peasantry.

The class structure based on estates was retained but without political privileges as the king held all the power. The nobility and clergy were privileged, as they owned their land, were exempt from taxation and the held special judicial status. The upper middle class or bourgeoisie took part in the economic rise and was able, through the purchase of

56 offices and their work in the civil service, to advance into the nobility and became

“Nobility of the Robe.” The Petits bourgeois (lower middle class) and the peasants shouldered the economic burden of the state by paying very high taxes.

ECONOMIC TRENDS

Mercantilism was also called “Colbertism” after Louis XIV’s finance minister – Jean

Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683). As minister of finance Colbert developed the first national economy of the modern age or a system of economic nationalism. This state-guided economy included statistical planning of the budget and regularized book keeping.

Mercantilism created the financial basis for the development of absolutism because customs duties, direct (the Taille) and indirect (excise) taxes, provided the state with profits to maintain an army, the administration, and the court. Since according to the concept of the day, wealth consisted of money, mercantilism aimed at a favorable balance of trade through the export of valuable finished products, such as, luxury and fashion articles, glassware, perfumes, and porcelain. Consequently there was an elimination of interior customs duties. The infrastructure of the nation was improved by the development of roads and canals, the establishment of state monopolies, and the subvention of manufactures as in large craft enterprises with division of labor. Moreover, there was a promotion of navigation and trading associations (colonies in particular); protective tariffs, fixed prices for agricultural goods; encouragement of marriage, and the prohibition of emigration. While mercantilism promoted commerce and the crafts and thereby increased the prosperity of the upper and middle classes, the peasants were not stimulated to increase their production. Thus, this was a system against the Free

57 Enterprise of manufactures and trade that the Netherlands became so famous for. Also, in France, and much of Europe the “Guild System” protected craftsmen and artisans and their small shop system from competition and factories.

LOUIS XIV (1638-1715)

In 1643, Louis became king at the age of five years old. Cardinal Mazarin became his regent, ruling for Louis until he died in 1661. Mazarin established the role of a powerful Prime Minister. But when he died, Louis, now 23, became the “Sun King” - absolutely absolute monarch. Of delicate figure, courteous and restrained, yet of majestic bearing, pervaded by the dignity of his office (“L’ etat c’est moi!”), he felt called to increase his power and represent the glory of the state. His theory of government held that he was superior. His “inner” light guided his decisions, and thus he led by intuition, not facts or advice. The King shares God’s knowledge & authority. Thus God’s divine functions are performed on earth by kings and one dare not challenge him. The king then held the country as his fief. Thus Louis challenged the old days when there was only a

King “in” France. Now there was a King “of’ France. Louis recognized a duty to the people but there was no recourse for failure by the king. Government was executed by decree. The government was under the sole authority of the king. However, he was assisted by a “secret” Council in State and departmental ministers. It was called “the

Cabinet,” because they met in a small private chamber. Louis interfered in the legal processes by royal orders of arrest (lettres de cachet), secret police, and political detention in the Bastille.

58 The Army was run by Louvois (1641-91), minister of war after 1668. He increased the standing army to 170,000 men out of a French population of approximately 16 million. He introduced uniforms, improved the equipment (helped introduce the bayonet), organized troops functionally (utilizing infantry, cavalry, artillery) and fixed ranks. The king appointed and paid the aristocratic officers. Led by Marshals Turenne,

Conde, and Luxembourg, the French army became the largest and best in the world.

Vauban (1633-1707) revolutionized fortress construction by means of star-shaped bastions that eliminated the “dead angle” of shooting. The techniques of utilizing the siege and of warfare in general were thereby altered.

In terms of administration of the nation, the royal intendants or civil servants worked in the provinces and in the royal magistracies in the cities. The aristocratic landlords

(signeurs) retained administrative and police powers in the countryside.

VERSAILLES

The opulent palace of Versailles was designed by Mansart (1598-1666) and erected from 1624 to 1708. It became the symbol of the absolute state and luxuriously decorated.

Lebrun (1619-90) did the interior decoration that was uncomfortable but representative and was wasteful in material. The palace was surrounded by the “green architecture” of geometrically planned parks with fountains and radial axes pointing to the center of the palace and the King’s bedroom. The king’s meals had to be bowed down to as they were taken to the king’s rooms. The rest of Europe copied the French palace and parks and speaking French became the rage along with French customs, courtly behavior, food, parades, opera and ballet.

59 More importantly, Louis XIV used Versailles to help unify the French nation by bringing the nobility of the various regions of France to live with him. Here he wined and dined them with lavish parties and gambling halls where he weakened them financially and politically and thus creating sycophants who bowed and scraped for his favor. Before Louis XIV, France had many regional powers that vied with the king for power.

Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642) and Louis XIV and Mazarin and

Colbert worked to create one king, one language, and one faith. 1) They created a standardized French Language where before there had been 30 dialects. 2) They standardized what was taught in the educational institutions. 3) They unified the nation under one Faith under Roman Catholicism.

CHURCH POLICY

The king safeguarded a Catholic State church policy by giving royal privileges and appointments to ecclesiastical leaders. The Catholic clergy were exempt from paying taxes. France also censored papal decrees from Rome by a policy paper called the

“Gallican Articles” that were confirmed by the National Council of Paris in 1682. To restore the country to the unity of faith in the Catholic Church, the “Dragonades” – military pressure and imprisonment were used. The Peace of Westphalia had made the

French produce the Edict of Nantes in 1648 to protect and tolerate French Protestants, or

Huguenots, and to respect their places of living and worship. However, to unify France,

Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and it prompted a half-million Huguenots to flee the country. These Huguenots emigrated to Prussia, Germany, the Netherlands, England

60 and the North American Colonies. Huguenots were usually very talented and productive elements in society, and thus, the Mercantilist economy was severely damaged by their emigration. Louis XIV and France lost money in doing this. Louis XIV’s policies were severely criticized by Brandenburg -Prussia, and Holland. Holland was called the

“suburb of the Enlightenment” by Pierre Bayle.

After 1710 Louis XIV persecuted the Jansenists, named after Cornelius Jansen,

Bishop of Ypres, who were an anti-clerical movement advocating inner renewal of

Catholicism in the spirit of Augustine and Protestant Christianity. The convent of Port-

Royal, near Versailles, was its center. Jansenism continued to exist in Italy, in the

Netherlands where it was called the Church of Utrecht and in Austria where it was called

Josephism. Theologically, this movement advocated salvation in Christ and an abiding relationship with Him directly and intimately and in the study of the Bible – all things similar to Protestant Reformed churches and which was at the heart of early church fathers such a Augustine in his Confessions. This ran against the hierarchical and rigid liturgical theology of the Catholic Church.

LOUIS XIV AND ENLIGHTENED DESPOTISM

Generally speaking the French Age, the late 1600’s to the early 1700’s succeeded the

Spanish Age of the 1500’s. The kings that lived around Louis XIV in the rest of Europe copied everything French including his absolutism but they were also taught by the

Enlightenment thinkers and so became “Enlightened Despots.” Louis XIV, himself, resisted the reforms and political suggestions of the philosophes and actively suppressed and censored them, while he enjoyed and participated in the cultural aspects of the

61 Enlightenment. In terms of absolutism, Catherine II –The Great – justified ruling Russia because of the vastness and need for stability. Joseph II of Austria justified ruling the

Holy Roman Empire that comprised much of Central and Eastern Europe because of the diversity or polyglot nature. Frederick II of Prussia invoked the hereditary and absolutist principles to keep the unity of all the various political interests in Prussia and the German states. Thus, none of them wished to give up any power or privilege to Enlightenment political ideas of constitutions, representative government, and a common law.

And yet all of these kings and many more copied French language, customs, and architecture. They also learned practical, pragmatic policies from the Philosophes such as, 1) how to improve the handling of public funds. 2) Civil service and merit appointments allowed for individual initiative. 3) They learned to implement written law codes and documents that put limits on power and how it would operate. 4) They emphasized education, public morality, citizenship, reason, order, and tolerance. The power of Enlightened despots actually increased as written powers made their position more explicit. Administrative efficiency lightened the load on the King and thus made control of the state easier. However, constitutions opened the way for the eventual elimination of monarchs because the Lex Rex – Law is King and the depersonalization of power in written laws. Taxation then became the prerogative of legislative bodies and not by the Kingly fiat as in the past.

EUROPEAN DIPLOMACY AND WARFARE

The countries, nations, or kingdoms of Europe were in an almost constant state of diplomacy and warfare from the 1600’s to the 1760’s. They did this in order to gain the advantage and tip the balance of power or as in England’s case to keep the balance of

62 power from becoming too one sided. By the early 1700’s the ascending powers in the

European world were England, Prussia, Russia, and Austria. The declining powers were

Turkey, the Netherlands, Sweden, Spain, and France.

When Louis XIV took over France at the age of 22 he aimed at gaining European hegemony and rounded out the state’s frontiers in the West and North along the Rhine

River. In 1658 Louis was able to take advantage of the Rhenish anti-Habsburg alliance made up of the electorates of Mainz, Cologne and others with the object of encircling the

Holy Roman Empire, to attempt to gain support of the “neighbors of the neighbor;”

Sweden, Poland, Hungary, and Turkey. Turkey was known as the “chained dog of

Europe.” Subsidies to other countries were the usual means of diplomacy. Examples of

Louis XIV’s incursions were the 1681 annexation of Strasbourg, and the 1684 occupation of Luxemburg and the inclusion of it in the building of a fortification system to secure the

French border.

From 1701-1714, Louis XIV engineered The War of Spanish Succession in order to put a French heir – Philip of Anjou- on the Spanish throne. This war pitted France against the Austrian Empire (or old Holy Roman Empire). Austria also was trying to put its chosen king on the Spanish throne. This war intensified and caused the first “world” war of modern times. The theatres of war were Spain where a civil war was taking place,

Italy (and Prince Eugene), Southern Germany or what was called the Palatinate (and

Louis of Baden), the Netherlands, on the oceans and in the North Sea where the British set up a naval blockade. The main combatants were France versus Austria and Britain.

In 1703 Austria attempted to elevate Archduke Charles III to be king of Spain. In 1704 the British seized Gibraltar. There were brilliant victories by the allies at Blenheim in

63 1704, Oudenaarde in 1708, Malplaquet in 1709. After seven years of war France was exhausted and had added problems with the overburdening of the mercantilist system, the pressures of taxation and internal insurrections – as in the Camisard uprising of the

Huguenots in the Cevennes. Peace offers by Louis XIV to surrender Spain and vacate

Alsace failed because of the excessive demands of England and Austria. Two accidents caused a political turn of events: 1) the fall of the Whig government and the beginning of the Bolingbroke (the Tories came to power) era in Great Britain and 2) the death of

Emperor Joseph I of Austria, who was succeeded by Charles VI. The connection of

Spain with Austria now brought about the renewed threat of Habsburg world power.

However, France and the maritime powers reached an agreement with the Austrian

Empire on this new arrangement.

When the War of Spanish Succession finally ended the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 became the second peace congress of the modern age. It brought about the partition of the Spanish Empire. The country itself and the colonies went to Philip of Anjou. He had been Louis’s choice to begin with and so he became Philip V who reigned from 1700 to

1746. The European territories went to Austria, meaning parts of Northern Italy. The

Barriere Treaty secured the Belgian territories and strongholds for the Dutch. Great

Britain obtained Gibraltar, Minorca, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and the Hudson Bay

Territories and the monopoly of the slave trade in Latin America. After a military epilogue the Austrian Emperor recognized the new order in the 1714 Peace of Rastatt and

Baden.

64 As Great Britain did most of the fighting and really won the War of the Spanish

Succession it now became the “arbiter of Europe” and the power able to grant the largest subsidies as a result of this “most businesslike of all our wars.”

QUESTIONS: 1. What was the Peace of Westphalia all about? 2. Define Absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, and enlightened monarchy. 3. Describe the social trends in Europe and the three estates in France. 4. What is Mercantilism?

Describe and explain the reign of Louis XIV in France and how France dominated

European affairs. 5. Explain the War of Spanish Succession and what happened in the end for Spain, France, the Holy Roman Empire and Great Britain.

FURTHER READING:

The Anchor Atlas of World History. Two Volumes. Garden City, New York: Anchor

Books – Anchor Press/Doubleday, Vol 1. –1974, Vol 2. – 1978.

P. Burke. The Fabrication of Louis XIV (1992).

Brian Stanley, Editor. Christian Missions and the Enlightenment. Grand Rapids,

Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2001.

H. Phillips. Church and Culture in Seventeenth Century France (1997).

G. Treasure. Louis XIV (2001).

Kenneth Clark. Civilization: A Personal View. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

Janetta Rebold Benton. Arts and Culture: An Introduction to the Humanities. Upper

Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2002.

J. DeVries and A. Van Der Woude. The First Modern Economy (1997).

Leland Ryken. Culture in Christian Perspective: A Door to Understanding and

Enjoying the Arts. Portland, Oregon: Multnomah Press, 1986.

65 THE SCIENTIFIC AGE

QUESTIONS: 1. Explain how Biblical principles have contributed to science.

2. How should our knowledge of the Biblical view of work and nature affect our own attitudes to research, study of the Bible, and the use of our minds?

3. Discuss this quote. “Without the absolute line which Christianity gives of the total uniqueness of Man, people have no boundary line between what they can do and what the should do.”

KEY EVENTS AND PEOPLE

Copernicus 1475-1543 Francis Bacon 1561-1626, Novum Organum Scientiarum 1620 Galileo 1564-1642 Pascal 1623-1662 Isaac Newton 1642-1727, Principia Mathematica 1687 Michael Faraday 1791-1867 Charles Darwin 1809-1882, Origin of Species 1859 Herbert Spencer 1820-1903 Albert Einstein 1879-1955 Russel Lee 1895 - Heinrich Himmler 1900-1945 B.F. Skinner 1904-1990, Beyond Freedom and Dignity 1971 Arthur Koestler 1905 – Kenneth B. Clark 1914- Murray Eden 1920 – Kermit Kranty 1923 –

FURTHER READING:

Robert Anchor. The Enlightenment Tradition. 1983

Peter Gay. The Enlightenment. 2 Volumes. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale

University Press, 1985.

75 ENLIGHTENMENT ERA TIMELINE

1700-1714 War of Spanish Succession 1740 Richardson’s Pamela 1740-48 War of Austrian Succession 1750 The First Volume of the Encyclopedia 1756-1763 Seven Year’s War or The French & Indian War 1759 Voltaire’s Candide 1763 Rousseau’s Social Contract 1766 Fragonard’s The Swing 1776 Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations 1776-1783 The American Revolution 1786 Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro 1785 Jacques Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii 1789-1815 The French Revolution and Napoleon

THE LASTING SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT L. Lee Peterson Gary K. Pranger

INTRODUCTION

The eighteenth century, an epoch referred to historically as the Enlightenment, had its origins in 1543 with the Copernican Revolution when the shocking assertion was made that the sun, rather than the earth, was the center of our planetary system.

Copernicus was far from the first to suggest such an outrageous idea and his later significance cannot be measured by the novelty of his claim. Rather, the importance of his proposal, ultimately, was the fact that he called the authorities of common observation and historical teaching of his time into question. In effect, he advocated an entirely new, more systematic process of acquiring knowledge than had before been attempted. By the late 1600’s the so-called “scientific method” was widely practiced with astonishing results in all the natural sciences. There prevailed in academic circles a general confidence that the careful application of human reason to the natural environment was capable of producing virtually unlimited benefits in every conceivable area of activity.

Gradually, this pattern, this model of thinking, that was so fruitful in the natural sciences, was applied to other areas of inquiry as well, particularly politics, economics, and aesthetics. This extension of the sovereignty of human reason as an adequate guide for truth, beyond the realm of strictly physical science, is what we term the Enlightenment.

This is the meaning of the “Age of Reason.”

FROM ROOTS TO RATIONALISM

The Age of the Enlightenment must be understood first and foremost as a highly philosophic period; that is, one that turned its attention self-consciously to a process of rational criticism and re-evaluation. Every area of human activity has its foundations rooted within certain basic beliefs and assumptions. The significance of the

Enlightenment can be measured by the extent to which it challenged, denied, or reaffirmed these assumptions. For example, in the political realm, if one accepts the assumption that the mass of mankind is ignorant and depraved while only a few are divinely qualified for leadership, then democracy would certainly not be such a person’s choice. In art, if a musician or painter believes in the metaphysical reality of harmonious principles at work in an orderly, universal system, then his productions will reflect that belief rather than a chaotic admixture of discordant sounds or colors.

To refer properly to the century of the Enlightenment means to speak of the 1700’s when certain men, predominantly French, began to assimilate progress that had been made in the natural sciences into a pattern of thinking for application to man’s social conduct. But the roots of the Enlightenment go back to the Renaissance with its humanistic base and to the Reformation era with its Protestant base. The specific catalyst that we will identify as ultimately generating the Enlightenment is the work of Nicolaus

Copernicus (1473-1543), a Polish astronomer and a Christian.

Copernicus was a late contemporary of Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) who was a famous Italian painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, and scientist. Copernicus and da

Vinci shared the rejection of many medieval habits of thought. During the Middle Ages

78 what was known about the universe was perceived as a teleological whole. This means that a central purpose and design unified the creation. Comprehension of this purpose was conceived to be man’s highest duty. While this view was certainly very Christian and good, medieval scholars were preoccupied “only” with metaphysical concerns.

There was little interest in the natural world except as either a testimony to the glories of

God or as an elaborate stage setting for the drama of salvation. Again while this was great and good there was little material progress in investigating the nature of Nature.

The notion that we now call “utility,” of actually exploiting natural resources to serve the purposes of man, would have been received as impious. And yet God commanded man to subdue and rule the earth which includes a use of the natural resources in plants and minerals that God put there for this purpose. Medieval scholars simply could not conceive of using or exploring nature for the progressive purposes that we now take for granted. Copernicus and da Vinci certainly did not reject the teleology of things but they knew that God’s creation was greater and more mysterious and worth studying and discovering the creation’s secrets. They decried the passivity of past scholars.

Three principal reasons altered the passive indifference to the natural sciences during the 15th and 16th centuries. First, the dramatic increase in world travel and exploration made the studies of navigation, astronomy, and meteorology indispensable necessities.

To be able successfully to circle the globe required increasingly accurate instruments of measurement and prediction. This expansion of world travel led, in turn, to higher levels of international trade, increased commerce in goods and “ideas.” The Mediterranean world, especially in the 1500’s, achieved unprecedented heights of wealth and culture.

The effect of this was to convince wealthy patrons of the arts and sciences that life in the

79 present world, as well as the one to come, was worthy of interest. Second, prosperity and learning introduced a secular enthusiasm for the good life and a humanistic alternative to monastic pietism and Christianity. Thirdly, Byzantine scholars emigrated to the West.

These were Eastern Orthodox Church people and thinkers from Greece and Eastern

Europe who came to the West after the fall of the Eastern Empire to the Muslims. They stimulated a revival of interest in Aristotelian science – a science, grounded firmly on the base of a Ptolemaic (or geo-centric) universe. Geo-centric meant that the earth is the center of all things in the universe.

Thus, when Copernicus published his findings in a work entitled On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, he was taking an adventurous step but one that fit perfectly with the prevailing spirit of exploration and discovery. He had no specific intentions of creating controversy and in fact studiously sought to avoid conflict in his carefully worded introduction. His claims did not contradict the whole of the Ptolemaic system nor did they correspond very closely to our modern astronomy. Yet they made one astonishing claim: the Earth moves. This was stated as a hypothesis that had aesthetic merit. In other words, Copernicus did not have the kind of instrumentation that would have confirmed his belief, but he maintained it anyway – solely on the ground that it dramatically simplified an otherwise contradictory and complex explanation of planetary motion. Copernicus hereby challenged both the most common evidence of the senses (the

Earth after all does not “seem” to move) and the historic teachings of the Church based on Ptolemy and Aristotle and a much too literal interpretation of the Bible concerning nature. He introduced two new principles into the realm of scientific inquiry: critical analysis and mathematical regularity. Mere unaided observation would never again be

80 accepted as a sufficient authority for truth without standing the test of rigorous, analytical scrutiny.

Another scientist whose work contributed to the development of the scientific method was Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), a German Lutheran who certainly believed that the universe was a teleological whole. He believed God gave mankind the ability to understand the laws of harmony and proportion. Like Copernicus, Kepler began from a position of faith in what he called “the simplicity and orderly regularity of Nature.” The application of this concept to the motion of Mars led him to the construction of an elliptical (rather than circular) orbit. Since his theory demanded a consistency of habit among all the planets, he effectively designed a model to describe the motion of all planets. The significance of Kepler’s work is this: he showed the success of seeking simple mathematical relations, and the necessity of verifying them by calculation and observation. He demonstrated that the heavens follow universal and regular laws.

Finally, he revealed that Earth itself is bound to these laws, contrary to the accepted teaching that the various levels of heavenly spheres were qualitatively and quantitatively different.

The twin concepts of the objective reality of a moving Earth and the uniformity of

Nature were subsequently confirmed by the telescopic observations of an Italian, Galileo

(1564-1642), and daringly published in his book entitled, Dialogue on the Two Chief

World Systems – Ptolemaic and Copernican (1632). Here he argued that Scholastic thinkers slavishly relied on Ancient authorities and Aristotle and refused to open their eyes to newly discovered scientific facts. As a strong Christian he argued that men are given their reasoning powers in order to discover and understand knowledge that may be

81 new and that it may change what man understands about nature but that this knowledge in no way refutes or denies the veracity of spiritual things. His desire to separate faith and science was not to refute Christianity but simply to allow science the freedom to do its work. His own Christian faith had actually given him the impetus to do his research. In other words he like many scientists who were Christians did not see God threatened by the new science, when non-Christians saw the implications and wanted a true separation between God and science. But the Roman Catholic Church authorities did not see it this way and he was later forced to recant this work. Nevertheless, the damage was done.

Now, with the aid of a recently invented instrument, the telescope, Galileo and other scientists could actually observe the processes of a universe in which all stellar relationships are susceptible to mathematical law.

It took the intellectual work of two philosophers to formulate the implications of

Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo, and then articulate general principles for the new method of thinking. Francis Bacon (1561-1626), an English philosopher, essayist and statesman, and a Christian, has been described as the champion of “inductive reasoning” and the “father of empiricism” and this was introduced and explained in The

Advancement of Learning and in his major work Novum Organum. The term,

“empiricism” simply means an attitude of accepting only tangible, external evidence as a basis for objective truth. The limits of knowledge, he wrote, are equivalent to the limits of our direct observation from experience. Only sensible experience is the source of all knowledge. Hence, the only legitimate way of arriving at general principles (or axioms) is through experimentation and through the accumulation of data. This process of accumulating particular facts and reserving judgment about their meaning until a

82 conclusion may be based on substantial testimony is what is meant by “inductive reasoning.” It is a progression from specific facts to general conclusions. According to

Bacon, not only was such a skeptical procedure necessary for progress in the natural sciences, but it was also the only means of determining the truth about anything in the physical world.

Another vital contribution of Bacon was the fact he advocated material progress through science. In other words, for Bacon, science served as a descriptive and a functional purpose. Nature could actually be put to work for man. It is small wonder that within a century and a half it was Bacon’s England that would be at the forefront of the

Industrial Revolution. It was Bacon whose experimental methodology would ultimately prevail in the world of science.

However, a Frenchman named Rene Descartes (1596-1650) contributed another methodology that would have profound implications for the future. In his exhaustive work, Discourse on Method, Descartes outlined in full detail the position of philosophical skepticism. That is, he argued that any genuine certainty, any meaningful article of faith, must begin with doubt. One should reject, he argued, all the teachings of parents, school, church and state in order to begin a fresh and authentic inquiry into truth. Then, one should accept as truth only what he is able to conceive for himself with absolute clarity and conviction. In this process, according to Descartes, the physical senses are of little assistance. They are too deceptive, too fallible, too subject even to the possibility of a material world that is nothing more than a transient hoax. Thus, Descartes drew a more severe line than Bacon and others between the world of sense and the realm of reason.

For empiricists like Bacon, physical sense was a “source” of information that was to be

83 digested, analyzed, interpreted, and applied by reason. For Descartes, reason alone could be sufficient as both the “source” and the “implementer” of truth. His construction of sound, universal axioms from which specific formulas could be deducted enabled him to become the inventor of analytical geometry. His deduction of all, more specific truths from general principles of thought enabled him to become known as the Father of

Modern Philosophy with the statement, “I think (rather than “I sense” as Bacon would have said), therefore I am.”

Descartes even proved the existence of God by his deductive method. In a long deductive discourse he concluded that man has an internal desire for perfection and an idea of perfection and yet there is no perfection anywhere in the created world or universe, thus he deduced that God who is perfect must exist. However, the scientific community rejected Descartes’ Rationalism as too abstract and too removed from the proofs of empirical data. He was not experimental enough for the world of material progress. But non-Christian scientists and Enlightenment thinkers did accept his philosophical dualism, his strict division, between the realm of matter, physical substance, and the realm of mind and spirit. They simply reversed his emphasis, placing a higher priority on empirical evidence and lesser confidence in the so-called “mere speculations” of metaphysical (spiritual and unseen) truth. The importance of this distinction is difficult to overestimate. Our world today, generally, still regards the physical as certain and the metaphysical and the unseen as illusion.

As England had it’s “Restoration” and the Glorious Revolution, and Liberalism and

Enlightenment thought began to flourish one of the most brilliant individuals in history

84 came on the scene, Isaac Newton (1642-1727). Of Isaac Newton, Alexander Pope wrote:

Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night God said: ‘Let Newton be,’ and all was light.

The problem of philosophical method of arising from the dispute of empiricism and rationalism found its resolution in Newton’s “Rules of Philosophizing.” Newton’s method is not that of pure deduction but of analysis, not of beginning with a general hypothesis and developing its logical conclusions but of beginning with the evidence of the senses and forming hypotheses form the tendency of the phenomena. Newton also did not participate in the strict dualism between physical fact and metaphysical thought.

For Newton, the individual facts of observation led conclusively and unerringly to infallible general principles. This was because Newton began his observations of Nature with a presupposition that gave them meaning. He assumed the reality of universal law ordained by God. Although his methodology and the results of his work varied enormously from the more simplistic thinking of the Middle Ages, he shared this one, essentially Christian aspect: he believed the universe to be a teleological whole, a cohesive well-designed system with purpose and regularity. Newton’s Mathematical

Principles of Natural Philosophy was actually written with nothing less than the ambitious task of proving this true. Newton’s ability to maintain a “holistic” view of

Nature and Reality was rooted in his rejection of Descartes on both major points. He rejected Rationalism for its suggestion that unassisted thought could arrive at sufficient truth. But he also rejected dualism by insisting that the realms of the natural and the metaphysical were complimentary and vital to one another. The fallacy of later thinkers, like modern existentialists, was the rejection of Rationalism but the acceptance of a world

85 view that rested on such general principles as gravitation and inertia, and one that became the model for all scientific progress until the time of Einstein.

It should be noted here that Francis Schaeffer’s observation that modern science was born out of Reformation Christianity is here largely substantiated. All the early scientists listed so far were Christians including Newton who spent almost as much time studying the Bible and the book of Revelation as he did physics and mathematics. So it needs to be seen here that Enlightenment thinkers and future scholars who were deistic and secular celebrated all the early discoveries of the above men but divorced them from the

Christian understanding of the universe. In so doing they invented the concept of

“modern science” as separate from the superstitions and illusions of faith and the Bible.

They accepted Descartes’ dualism and relished the thought that man and science alone could solve all of mankind’s problems, understand the universe and bring man toward perfection. The power of this secular “propaganda” was that all thinking Christians,

Christian leaders, scholars and denominations were made to wrestle with the new scientific findings, especially when evolution became the hot topic from the 18th century to the nineteenth century. Thus, some Christians went along with the new findings and/or accommodated them some how. Others rejected them and made up their own findings based entirely on their studies of the Bible. And thus, Christians and non-Christians helped to divorce faith and science in the thinking of the general public.

What occurred in the 18th century Enlightenment was a rational application of

Newton’s systematic worldviews to the new sciences, the non-physical sciences: political science, aesthetic criticism, social science, and economics. The most influential

Englishman to apply the standards of natural law to social relationships was John Locke

86 (1632-1704). No other thinker has had a more profound effect on the principles that support our constitutional system.

By the term “natural law” we mean a doctrine that the basic principles of justice and of right and wrong are evident and agreeable to all thinking men. According to Locke, it was natural law that provided the foundation for men and women to form societies on the basis of mutual needs and responsibilities. The agreement of humans to create governments for their mutual protection and benefit was referred to as a “social contract.”

This notion differed markedly from the historic divine right theory of absolute monarchy and even from the proposals of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) just a generation earlier.

Hobbes, the author of Leviathan argued that men were evil by nature and in a constant state of warfare with each other whereas Locke argued the other way that man is good by nature and is more than capable of self-government. Hobbes made the famous dictum that life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” He defended the need for the traditional absolutist King to bring law, order, tradition, and stability to government and society.

Without the King life would be chaos.

John Locke’s understanding of society rested for its success on the compatibility of men who were essentially reasonable, good-willed, morally upright, and infinitely educable. Such a society had no meaningful place for obsolete concepts of Original Sin and Divine Intervention. It was perfectly compatible with the popular religion of the academic and political world: Deism. Natural Law as understood by the devoutly

Christian Isaac Newton had certainly been twisted out of its context.

As an empiricist, Locke held the view that man is born into the world as a blank tablet onto which is written all the effects of his experience. Man, therefore, brings to his

87 experience no inherited characteristics of a fallen nature or pre-determined traits. Man is perceived by Locke to be the product of his environment. It became the responsibility of the Enlightenment thinkers, therefore, to create for man as perfect an environment as human reason was capable of producing. This belief is what modern behavioral scientists call “environmental determinism.”

Locke argued that mankind as a whole had certain rights and privileges bestowed upon it as an act of Nature. There was life, liberty, and the accumulation of property.

The chief function of government was to protect these rights and promote the general welfare of the commonwealth. Whenever governments became a source of threat rather than security, the people had both a right and a duty to overthrow such misrule.

Because of the evolutionary nature of British political events, Locke’s ideas there provoked few actions of a radical or revolutionary character. In France, however, in the aftermath of Louis XIV, who died in 1715, the ruling classes of aristocracy and monarchy proved much more resistant to moderate reform. The political system was notoriously corrupt and the economy hopelessly inefficient. A group of French writers, known collectively as the philosophes began in the mid-1700’s to publish various forms of propaganda advocating particular reforms. There were two principal adversaries they fought against and who they directed their attacks: the Church and the State.

In reference to religion, the philosophes were opposed to the control of parochial education by the Roman Catholics. It was their contention that education should be a responsibility of the State, not the Church. In their views, Christianity had exhibited a dangerous bias against all forms of progressive, scientific thinking. Also, the historic conflict among the various sects of the Christian faith created a picture for them of

88 believers as intolerant and bigoted. Finally, the Church used education for narrowly clerical purposes that had little application to the needs of a more secular, individualistic society. Altogether, the Christian faith was roundly condemned by the philosophes whose spectrum of beliefs ranged from deism to pantheism and atheism.

In their attitude toward the State, the philosophes recommended very specific kinds of reform: a government based on popular consent and natural law; the security of individual liberties; the end of mercantilism; criminal justice reform; the elimination of a privileged class system. Three of the greatest philosophes, Montesquieu, Voltaire, and

Rousseau need to be analyzed.

Baron de la Brede et de Montesquieu (born Charles Louis de Secondat) (1689-1755) published The Spirit of the Laws (1748) in which he upheld the English constitutional government as closest to the ideal. He especially admired the doctrine of separation of powers into executive, legislative, and judicial. These divisions provided a check and balance system in order to safeguard the public against an abuse of power.

Francois Marie Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778) taught his readers to think and to criticize, to avoid superstitions, and most importantly to practice tolerance. Despite his confidence in reason, natural law, and the capacity of man for self-improvement, he entertained no idealistic illusions about the flaws of present society. In his most famous work, Candide, he satirically mocked the optimism of some of his contemporaries who held this to be “the best of all possible worlds.” Voltaire used his savage wit to attack injustice in government, corruption in morality, and bigotry in religion.

Finally, it was Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) the political philosopher and writer, born in Switzerland, who proved to be the most radical of the philosophes and is

89 frequently regarded as the pioneer of modern socialistic thinking. Rousseau held that in a state of nature men were perfect, free, and equal. It was the institutions of civilization that had corrupted and enslaved man. His most famous line was written at the beginning of

The Social Contract: “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” Rousseau actually broke company with the mainstream of the philosophes in three respects.

First, Rousseau’s insistence upon equality and democracy was much more radical than anything envisioned by Montesquieu and Voltaire. Voltaire ridiculed his extreme faith in the goodness of common man to achieve a virtuous society. Secondly, he believed that the quality and common welfare of natural man could best be promoted in a collective society and in a pure democracy where there is no government. It is here that

Rousseau has been made the father of socialism and communism because Karl Marx a century later would dramatically revive these ideas. Voltaire ridiculed these ideas as he believed that an educated elite would best lead society. Finally, Rousseau did not share the philosophes’ unqualified confidence in human reason. Rather, he endorsed the basic goodness of man’s untrained intuition. It was his departure from reliance on intellect to an emphasis on feeling that placed him as a forerunner of the next historical episode, the

Romantic Period.

In conclusion, what were some of the lasting effects of Enlightened thinking? In politics, it brought about a period of reformed monarchies called “Benevolent

Despotism.” They moved continental Europe closer to the standards of constitutionalism, consent of the governed, social contract, and due process of law. These ideas had already been developing gradually in the British system and very soon in the American and

French Revolutions. Because of the emphasis on natural laws, a Scot named Adam

90 Smith (1723-1790) was prompted to write The Wealth of Nations (1776). This book advocated an end to governmental control of economics (Mercantilism) and it became the bible of free enterprise capitalism.

Out of the Enlightenment came the demands for modern secular education. In philosophical thought it is still the common habit of Western man to be skeptical about any proposition of truth that cannot be verified by the senses. Finally, it was this age that gave birth to a movement that was later to be called liberalism. In its beginnings,

“Liberal” simply meant any policy that was designed to broaden the popular base of participation in political and economic affairs, to extend the benefits of citizenship as universally and indiscriminately as reason would allow. Even Christians could consider themselves liberals in this sense. Even as Christians we can applaud many of the advances and reforms of Enlightenment Liberalism. However, we reject the pronounced bias against Christianity that grew out of this time amongst Liberals who thought of themselves as enlightened reformers and then humanists and secularists as the 18th century moved toward the 19th and 20th centuries. A very real problem was how to preserve the positive gains without sharing in the loss of faith and morality. The French

Revolution with its violence and the Industrial Revolution with its abuses of the common worker were to bring about disillusionment with the omnipotence of human reason. Thus the Enlightenment of the 1700’s gave way to the Romantic Age of the early 1800’s where feeling and intuition prevailed over reason and the mind.

91 QUESTIONS: 1. Who were the early scientists and thinkers and did they reject God and the Bible in founding science? How did the conflict come about that scientists who were

Christians were in conflict with Church authority? Were the early scientific discoveries misinterpreted by later thinkers? Explain. 2. Is Christianity separate from science? Does it have to be? Assess this statement by Francis Schaeffer, “Christianity is the mother of science.” 3. How did the Age of the Enlightenment come about? Who are the individual thinkers and what are the ideas and themes that shaped “modern” thinking?

FURTHER READING:

Peter Gay. The Enlightenment. 2 Volumes. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale

University Press, 1981.

Marvin R. O’Connell. Blaise Pascal: Reasons of the Heart. Grand Rapids,

Michigan: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 1997.

Daniel Roche. France in the Enlightenment. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard

University Press, 1998.

92 THE GERMAN EMPIRE AFTER 1648 PRUSSIA & AUSTRIA

Gary K. Pranger

The wars of religion and political position that ended in 1648 left the area that is called Germany today devastated. There was a reduction in the population from fifteen million to ten million. In some areas there was as much as a 70% reduction. Moreover, there occurred a general degeneration of society with widespread robbery, brutality, dissipation and delusions about witchcraft. However, recovery was rapid as many princes consolidated and came together to rectify the problems. They centralized the administrations, armies, and taxation. These small German duchies and kingdoms became focal points of political and cultural life as they “Frenchified,” or copied the forms of life and culture from Louis the XIV’s France. Brandenburg and Bavaria were absolute states but Wurtemberg and Mecklenberg were examples of states that developed consititutions in efforts to be benevolent, enlightened kingdoms.

The German states were still a part of the larger “Holy Roman Empire” that covered much of central Europe or what was known in this time as the Habsburg Empire. This empire consisted of 300 sovereign parts but most lacked the consciousness of belonging to the imperial empire. Samuel Pufendorf (1632-94), an expert on international law, wrote in1667 that the empire was a “Gothic monstrosity” with absolutist members. The governing bodies of the Empire were divided between the Emperor (the Austrian or Holy

Roman Emperor) and the Empire with the dualistic court Chancery at Vienna and the

Chancery of the Empire of Mainz (Central Germany today). Also the Council of the

Imperial Court was at Vienna from 1644 and the Supreme Court of the Empire was at

Wetzlar after 1693. In 1663 a permanent Imperial Diet (Reichstag) was established at

93 Regensburg. It was a congress of delegates structured into three curiae or administrative bodies. There were the electors (8 kings), the princes (165), and the Imperial Cities (61), and all were subdivided according to their Christian confession (i.e. whether they were

Protestant, Catholic or Orthodox). In 1658 this Imperial Diet voted in an election in which Leopold I (1658-1705) from the Habsburg family won over the other candidate who was Louis XIV of France. However, the electorates of Mainz, Cologne and others from what today is Germany maintained an anti-Habsburg alliance. This presaged the growing unity of “Germany.”

After 1648 four of the largest states in the empire competed for German political control. Austria was traditionally dominant in German affairs as it governed from Vienna and was very strictly Roman Catholic by confession. Bavaria (the largest state in

Germany today) with its capital at Munich was just north of Austria and mostly Catholic.

Saxony, north of Bavaria, was mostly Lutheran and claimed some of the most beautiful cultural centers in the cities of Dresden and Leipzig. Prussia in 1648 was the smallest state but would outgrow the others very quickly. It’s capital, Berlin, was also the newest of these cities but would grow in importance. It was the northernmost and easternmost of any German state and it bordered the Baltic Sea and Poland. Prussia was mostly

Lutheran.

94 BRANDENBURG-PRUSSIA

Originally, Prussia or what was known as Brandenburg in the Middle Ages was part of a military buffer zone intended to protect the Holy Roman Empire from Asiatic

Barbarian invaders. Then in 1356, Emperor Charles IV’s issued a Golden Bull (a decree) that made Brandenburg one of seven electors to the Imperial Diet. This meant the king of

Brandenburg could help select the future emperors. In 1415 the Hohenzollern family became the new ruling aristocratic family. In 1525 the Hohenzollern Grand Master of the

Teutonic Knights declared himself to be a Protestant in accordance with Martin Luther’s

Reformation. An area called Prussia, along with many others, were added and the state became known as Brandenburg-Prussia. At the conclusion of the Thirty Years War in

1648, Brandenburg-Prussia received a favorable territorial settlement in the Peace of

Westphalia for fighting on the winning side as an ally of France against the Habsburgs.

Frederick William I, the Great Elector reigned from 1640-88 and he became the true creator of the Brandenburg-Prussian nation state. He deprived the estates of power, that is the right to consent to taxation. He granted privileges to the nobility by exempting them from taxation and giving them autonomous control of their manorial estates. East

Prussia was gained after the Swedish-Polish War of 1655-1660.

The King ran the administration by utilizing a privy council or what Louis XIV called his “Cabinet.” Prussia’s fiscal administrative authorities or Kriegskammern for the country and the Domanenkammern for the royal domains ran by collecting the

“Kontribution” or direct real-estate taxes, or a head tax, if one did not own property.

Prussia established a Mercantilist economy to increase prosperity and create taxable income. Roads, dykes, canals were constructed and model farms introduced. Prussia’s

95 colonial policy followed the Dutch example as in 1683 the Gross-Freidrichsburg settlement was established in West Africa. This colony remained Prussian until 1720.

During the Great Elector’s reign the standing army was increased from 8,000 to 23,000 and it was trained, armed, disciplined. The Prussian military tradition began here as this army defeated the perennial powers of Sweden and France. The Edict of Potsdam invited and brought French Huguenots (Protestants) to Prussia as they fled from Louis XIV. In

Prussia there was a genuine toleration of Christian denominations and groups. Besides being nice, this was a pragmatic economic move as many of these French Protestants were wealthy and resourceful people who could help build up the Prussian State and the infrastructure.

Elector Frederick III (or King Frederick I) reigned in Prussia from 1688-1713. He was famous for founding the academy of sciences and the University of Halle. While he continued the economic policies of his father he attained the title of King in Prussia due to his loyal service to the Holy Roman Emperor in the War of Spanish Succession against

France.

King Frederick William I (1713-1740) became known as the Potsdam Fuhrer. He was most instrumental in Prussia’s domestic development and was determined to “govern his lands well.” He was deeply religious, but rough and averse to the refined court life.

He became known as “the drillmaster of the Prussian nation” and he demanded unconditional obedience. He said, “the soul is God’s, all else must be mine.” He had a bad temper and was a harsh ruler as he demonstrated the Prussian passion for punctuality and honesty. Any government minister late for a meeting was fined three months salary.

If he was absent he was fined six months of his salary. If that official was absent too

96 often he was fired. Embezzlement of even small amounts of government money was punishable by death. He ran a frugal administration by personally controlling the reforms of the royal domains and the General Exchequer (Treasurer). He cut the combined government and court expenditures by 4/5ths. He worked an 18 hour day starting at 4:00 a.m. He centralized the administration, reduced the cost of government, codified the laws, and reorganized the tax structure. He cut the power of the local nobles and forced them to pay a larger portion of Prussia’s taxes. For the army he added veteran foreigners and he liked big soldiers. He had a special corps called the Potsdam Giants. He organized the army into national cantons (units, divisions by locale) and used nobles who were trained in special schools if they were to become officers in the latest arts of war.

Army discipline was severe.

In 1733, the Canton military service became an obligation to the peasant population.

In 1732 the king settled 15,000 emigrants from Salzburg, Austria to expand his army.

Eventually, the aristocratic officer corps came to constitute the highest social class in

Prussia. The “soldier king,” as he became known, was the first European monarch to wear a uniform constantly. He increased the professional army to 83,000 men out of

Prussian population of 2.2 million. He believed the “military was Prussia, Prussia was the military,” and thus identified the military with Prussian national ideals and goals.

Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau (1683-1747) was the infantry’s disciplinarian and iron ramrod, drill master making them march in step. This Prussian military tradition would continue until World War II and 1945.

Throughout all of this and especially in Prussia’s and Greater Germany’s future

Enlightened Despotism comes into the picture. The humanitarian ideas of the age

97 influenced the theories of the state and society. The Enlightened Ruler governed his subjects as the “First Servant of the State” in accordance with the principles of reason, law, tolerance, and pragmatism. This is what the Enlightenment taught rulers, “Nothing but the people, everything for the people!” “Revolution from above” created the absolute and sovereign welfare state with a modern bureaucracy and an ordered system of law.

The coming constitutions, Lex Rex, and nagging legislatures would slowly undermine the need for monarch by the time of World War I. But for the time being monarchs saw only the advantages especially in the production of a strong nation and more money in the coffers.

One of the outstanding Enlightened Despots was Frederick II, The Great (1740-

1786). He continued his father’s reforms: fixed budgets, state monopolies on coffee, tobacco, and salt. He colonized the interior, drained the marshes of the Oder, Warthe and Netze valleys, and constructed roads and canals. 900 villages were established with over 300,000 new settlers. He promoted agriculture by teaching about the rotation of crops, potato cultivation, animal husbandry, tree care and forestry.

In terms of social organization, all classes were to serve the state. The King, personally governed, aided by counselors and secretaries and actively participated in inspections and observing his many projects. The nobility, that is the large landowners and proprietors of agricultural estates, provided officers for the army and high officials for the bureaucracy. The artisan and middle classes provided the crafts and commerce and carried the burden of taxation but they were supported by the state development of the silk, glass, and porcelain industries. The peasants remained farmers and in hereditary

98 dependence or a specific form of serfdom. All citizens were allowed freedom of thought and religion.

Samuel von Gocceji (1679-1755) initiated legal reforms eliminating torture, royal intervention in legal proceedings and the purchase of offices. He initiated the introduction of equality before the law and autonomy of the judiciary (division of powers amongst Judge & juries). Governmental examinations and pay for the legal profession were introduced as were uniform legal procedures regulating appeals, trial procedure, punitive measures and the prison system. Prussia changed from a police state to a constitutional state and the Prussian Law Code came into effect in 1794.

AUSTRIA & MARIA THERESA

Another follower of the Enlightenment and considered a good Enlightened Despot was Maria Theresa of Austria. Later, her co-regent, Joseph II would also be recognized as an enlightened monarch for his attempts at reform. The Austrian Empire or the Holy

Roman Empire had difficulty reforming because of the ethnic, social, political, and economic differences among its peoples. This Empire included what is today Austria,

Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and parts of Poland and Italy amongst other regions. Nevertheless, the Austria-Bohemian part of the Empire was transformed into a modern bureaucratic state organized into provinces and districts with a general tax obligation that included the Church and Nobility and based on the periodical census. In its legal system Protestants and Jews were subject to legal restrictions because it was a

Roman Catholic state. However, the state supervised the church and had the right of approval over papal edicts.

99 After his mother, Joseph II (1765-1790) introduced radical reforms to bring together a unified state but the Empire was not ready. He did centralize the administration and made German the official language of the Empire. In 1781 he abolished serfdom and the trade guilds, offered an edict of religious toleration but still without equality for all denominations. To reform the Roman Catholic Church in the Empire he dissolved 1,300 monasteries that were inactive. The government would supervise education and the pay of the priests. He established many schools and welfare institutions, such as, hospitals, orphanages, institutions for the insane and the blind. Marriage became a civil affair.

There was resistance to these reforms especially amongst the traditions and prerogatives.

The Nobles and Catholic Clergy so resisted that Joseph had to retract most of these reforms. Nonetheless, Joseph II is recognized after his mother as one of the best of the

Enlightened Despots. It should be noted that from the 1700’s, Austria remained, along with Russia, a most backward “power” as many of these reforms would not see light until after 1918 and World War I.

100 THE PRAGMATIC SANCTION

Maria Theresa was a woman and no woman was supposed to rule the Austrian

Empire – ever. How did she become Empress and one of the best monarchs the Empire ever had? Long before her coming to the throne her father Charles VI had a document that became known as “The Pragmatic Sanction” passed to all the electors and important participants in the empire asking them to sign and recognize the Empress as he had no male heir. Moreover, treaties with this special provision were established with Spain

(1725), Prussia (1728), Great Britain (1731) and France (1738) and all seemed well.

However, after the father’s death a new generation of monarchs arose as electors who had not signed The Pragmatic Sanction. And so these contended with Maria Theresa.

Frederick II the Great of Prussia did not recognize the Empress and went to war with her over territory known as Silesia and he won. The Silesian Wars had two phases 1740-

48 and 1756-63. But there was more to Frederick’s desire for Silesia and it had a pragmatic, Enlightened Despot kind of purpose more than his not recognizing her crown.

This region had important rivers that flowed north into Prussia and into the Baltic Sea and it had rich agricultural and industrial possibilities with coal and iron ore deposits. It was also a strategic place from which to threaten Saxony and Poland in his quest to continually expand Prussia.

At the same time Charles Albert of Bavaria was elected Emperor as Charles VII

(1742-45) by the rest of the electors and with France and its desire to weaken the Empire, went to war with Maria Theresa so he could her place in Vienna. This was called the

War of Austrian Succession also in the years 1740-48, just as Prussia was fighting her also. She won this war. Thus she beat Charles Albert but lost to Frederick the Great. In

101 the later Seven Years War (or The French and Indian War in North America) 1756 to

1763 she tried to gain Silesia back but lost again to Frederick.

To put her life into perspective during these times one must remember that Maria

Theresa was 23 in 1740. This was when she began her rule. She was inexperienced and very pregnant with the 4th of 16 children. In the wars of 1740-48 she rallied her

Hungarian nobles during her coronation as Queen of Hungary. To become the monarch of The Austrian or Holy Roman Empire at this point in time one had to where “dual” crowns, the crown of Austria and the Crown of Hungary. At the time of the wars the

Austrian army was very weak and the government broke. Her advisers were “ancient” and in their 70’s and who had no faith in her and generally resisted her. She had a husband who proved to be of little use except for producing children. Franz was what might be called “simple” minded and of no use in making decisions. Hungarian nobles and troops proved their loyalty to her as this new army won over Bavaria and France and called a truce with Frederick the Great, who as we have noted, kept Silesia. To satisfy her enemies she had her husband, Franz, elected Holy Roman Emperor, but she really ran the Empire.

THE DIPLOMATIC REVOLUTION

In 1756 Maria Theresa sought to counter the increasing power of Prussia and made a new alliance with France. Great Britain had been Austria’s ally, but was now ruled by

German Hanoverian monarchs (George I, II, III, Queen Victoria, etc) and so Britain sought to end her old alliance with Austria. The new British monarchs of England were concerned over the fate of their homeland, their German state of Hanover, because this was directly in the path of Frederick’s dreams of expansion. So Britain allied with

102 Frederick the Great who then promised not to expand that way. Before 1756, England and Austria had been allies against France and Prussia. After 1756 Great Britain and

Prussia allied against France and Austria who also allied. This also satisfied Great

Britain’s foreign policy of keeping a “balance of power” throughout Europe.

In 1756 Frederick the Great found himself in a predicament because of three women in his life who wanted to get rid of him. Frederick called Austria’s Maria Theresa the

“apostolic hag.” Frederick called Madame de Pompadour, Louis XIV’s mistress,

Madame Fish because he claimed her mother was a fish vendor. Frederick called Czarina

Elizabeth of Russia “the wildcat of the North.” These three nations, Austria, France, and

Russia wanted to eliminate him and weaken Prussia. However, Frederick proved his military brilliance and Prussia’s vaunted military might by defeating armies from Russia,

Austria, and France repeatedly. Prussia’s army moved so quickly that the three opponents never managed to combine their armies. However, Russia eventually threatened and almost defeated Prussia at one point but Elizabeth died. Paul II then ruled

Russia and he liked Frederick the Great and Prussia and promptly had his army switch sides in the conflict. At the same time Great Britain defeated France in an overseas war.

Britain did not fight at Frederick’s side in Europe but Prussia was given generous subsidies to keep its armies well financed.

The Seven Years war fought in Northern Europe was also a world war and known in

North America as “the French and Indian War,” because it was fought around the world between France and Britain over colonial possessions. Increasing immigration to the

North American colonies intensified the pressure that 400,000 British settlers had on well fortified but thinly settled French colonial territories. Constant border conflicts became

103 open warfare that led to the fall of the Whig government in Britain. William Pitt led the

British government from 1757-1761. William Pitt, The Elder, Earl of Chatham was considered the third architect of the British Empire after Cromwell and William III.

When he assumed political leadership he strengthened the navy and the overseas army.

In 1758 Britain advanced into the Ohio valley, seized Fort Louisburg and Fort Duquesne

(Pittsburg). In 1759, the British advanced to the St. Lawrence River and Quebec, “the heart of the enemy’s power.” General Wolfe defeated Montcalm on the plains of

Abraham before the city. Both generals died in the battle. The breakthrough to the Great

Lakes was made possible by the seizure of Montreal in 1760. It should be noted that a young colonial officer named George Washington obtained some valuable experience in participating in this war.

In the West Indies the British seized the Guadeloupe in 1759 and Martinique in 1762 among other Islands of the French Antilles. Spain entered the war on the side of the

British in 1761 and took Cuba, and the Philippine Islands in Southeast Asia. The war was also fought all over the Atlantic Ocean and along the Atlantic coast of West Africa.

By 1760 the British occupied all the French bases in Senegal and there were naval victories in Lagos and raids on French ports. In India, at first the French succeeded in winning, with the exception of Madras. As the tide of war turned the British won all of

India including Calcutta. Robert Clive, then 32 years old, and an employee of the British

East India Company, strengthened British resistance and utilizing the rivalries of the

Indian princes, he regained Calcutta and Fort William. In 1757, the British victory at

Plassey was obtained by treachery over a twenty-fold numerically superior French army

104 and with the loss of only ten men. This victory established British rule over India and all

French plans for colonizing India collapsed.

In 1763, the Peace of Paris, the treaty that ended the Seven Years War and the

French and Indian War, Great Britain obtained Canada, the Louisiana Territory, Cape

Breton and Senegal from France. Spain took possession of Florida, Cuba and the

Philippines. This was the most impressive victory for Great Britain in its history. North

America became Anglo-Saxon. Great Britain emerged as the dominant world colonial power up until the advent of World War II – 1939 to 1945.

EASTERN POWER VACUUMS: POLAND AND TURKEY

AND THE EASTERN QUESTION

After 1763, Russia and Austria wanted Frederick to join them in attacking the declining Ottoman Turkish Empire in southeastern Europe. Frederick’s Prussia was exhausted from the previous war but he could not afford to antagonize either power by siding with the other. He proposed as a solution to leave the Turks alone. Britain also pressured him as they wanted to keep the Turkish Empire intact to counter the power and

Empire designs of Russia and Austria. Instead, Frederick proposed to partition Poland between Russia, Austria and Prussia. This led to the three partitions of Poland in 1772,

1793 and 1795. To the powers of Europe, Poland’s weak, unstable government was a problem. Poland chose foreigners as kings, but these kings were unable to pass on their powers to their relatives. In the Polish legislature made up of about 1,000 members any one man could veto or prevent passage of any piece of legislation.

105 The Turkish Empire or what had once been known as the Ottoman Empire had once been one of the most feared and powerful Islamic Empires throughout the Middle Ages as Islam expanded throughout the Mediterranean region, Central Asia, and into India and

Southeast Asia. Crusaders from Europe had once tried to wrest the Holy Lands and

Palestine from the Ottoman’s grip but failed. After many centuries this empire had weakened and began falling apart and by the Enlightenment period in the 18th century it was called “The Sick Man of Europe.” Now that it was not a threat to Europe as it once had been it was seen that the Ottoman Empire’s demise would mean instability for

Europe and Great Britain in particular as it did not want to see Russia or Austria take these lands over. Hence, Britain’s diplomatic policy called for maintaining a balance of power in Europe so that no country had the predominance. More will be said on this in the next section.

CONCLUSION

The struggle between Prussia and Austria over “Greater Germany” was temporarily placed on hold because of joint opposition to the French Revolution beginning in 1789 and to Napoleon’s conquest of Europe. Prussia and Austria would battle it out again in

1871. Prussia continued to expand from 1763 and on into the next century through marriages and annexations of territory. Austria, Russia, and France would continue to see Prussia as a potential threat to themselves because of its large, modern army and its central geographic location.

Maria Theresa managed to begin the reorganization and centralization of her polyglot empire as the assorted minorities kept it in the mainstream of European politics.

However, Austria continued its domination of Italy. It worked to prevent German

106 unification under Prussia or any other power. However, Vienna never dealt with the need for reforms in the Hungarian dominated eastern half of the empire. This region would continue to simmer slowly until it brought on World War I a century and a half later.

QUESTIONS: 1. What was the German Empire like after 1648? What were the important German states? How did Brandenburg-Prussia arise? How did each of the

German kings work on this state to become a nation? 2. Describe Enlightened Despotism and how it differs from Absolute Monarchy and Constitutional Monarchy. 3. Who was

Maria Theresa and how did she come to power? What is the “Pragmatic Sanction?”

Explain. 4. Describe the Diplomatic Revolution? 5. What happened in the Seven Year’s

War and French and Indian War? What was the significance of this war? 6. What happened to Poland and what is the “Eastern Question?” 7. What significance did

Prussia and Austria have over the “Germany” and the rest of Europe?

FURTHER READING:

The Anchor Atlas of World History. Volumes 1 & II. Garden City, New York:

Anchor Books, 1974 and 1978.

D. Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (2002).

D. J. Ingrao. The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618-1815 (2000).

Henry Kissinger. Diplomacy. New York: A Touchstone Book: Simon & Schuster,

1994.

D. McKay. The Great Elector: Frederick William of Brandenburg-Prussia (2001).

107

18th CENTURY STATE COMPETITION 1713-1763

J. Franklin Sexton

The modern nation state, according to many historians, emerged in 1648. After about a half- century of development, national rivalries – mostly economic and strategic in motivation – issued into a vigorous competition on an international scale. To handle the new problems, the nations developed international diplomacy and such devices as the balance of power, compensation, and the diplomatic revolution to maintain a sort of equilibrium. These devices were to be operative into the twentieth century.

The situation in Europe basically came down to a competition for preeminence. This competition was because European states did not just want to be nations but “Empires” with more and more territory and power. The key force here was “national self-interest,” which in these days was in the minds of the King and the aristocracy. However, diplomatic maneuverings constantly undermined these efforts because they were foreseen as threats to the security and sovereignty of the neighboring countries and regions.

Wars to stop the expansion plans helped to create new diplomatic efforts with the concept of “compensation.” In these days a war was like a chess match where the contending kings really did not consider the lives and livelihoods that they destroyed but were out only to win their objectives of more land and more power. However, these wars were not winner-take-all activities as even the loser got something or was

“compensated.” The winner obtained the right to stop the encroachment or expansion of the other and keep or obtain new territories in its defense but the loser still got one or a number of its objectives met anyway. This was thought to be a way of stopping the losing country from seeking vengeance and another war in the future.

108 Making treaties or agreements usually after wars was the way objectives were met and how the map of Europe was redrawn from time to time. Important treaties for status in this time were the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) which was the treaty after the Spanish War of Succession (1701-1713). This treaty, it will be recalled, was supposed to end French

Bourbon dreams of controlling Spain by placing its heir on the throne. But as the treaty was worked out France was allowed to do this as compensation but it lost the actual territory it sought to possess that was in what we would call Belgium today and in several border regions. This treaty had other far reaching implications. 1) As England won this war on the seas, it made all the nations involved in the war recognize the English right to have a Protestant Christian as its successor to the crown. Hence, all the “Catholic” nations had to recognize the Protestant heritage of Great Britain and not fight against it any longer. 2) The Treaty of Utrecht separated France and Spain and limited them to their own spheres of influence or hegemony. Even though Spain now had monarchs that were “family” with the French kings, there could be no collusion between them and thus the balance of power would be maintained in this region. 3) Great Britain took possession of Gibraltar, a small peninsula at the southern tip of Spain, in order to control the sea traffic and protect its navy between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean

Sea. 4) All participating states now officially recognized the “King in Prussia” or the legitimacy of Prussia’s existence as a player in European affairs. 4) Spanish rights to the

Netherlands were ended along with the region of Belgium. Britain and Austria became protectors of this region in order to keep all other powers out so that the balance of power would be maintained.

109 The Treaty of Nystad (1721) ended a war between Russia and Sweden. Sweden up until the time was the dominant power in Scandinavia, and over Poland and Russian territory. When Russia and Peter the Great won this war, Sweden gave up the land that makes up Northwestern Russia today, including territory where St. Petersburg would be built. This gave Russia it’s “Window to the World,” or a port with which to have access to the rest of Europe and the world. Also it was understood by this treaty that the growing Russia and Austria coveted the southern Balkans and the Black Sea area and thus raised the “Eastern Question,” to which Britain would work to keep the Turkish,

Islamic, Ottoman Empire from dissolving. The Treaties of Karlowitz (1699) and

Passarowitz (1718) ended small wars that flared up over the Eastern Question. Basically, the provisions made in these treaties simply arranged or rearranged the ethnic groups in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire as it expanded. Russia’s habit of taking more of Poland for its own territory was put on hold. These treaties then defined the borders and peaceful relations that should exist between the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman

Empire, the Russian Empire and Prussia and the continued support of a balance of power amongst them all by Great Britain.

If one were to create a scoreboard of the relative position of the competing powers it would be described thus. The ascending powers that were getting stronger or bigger were

Great Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria. The declining powers or those that were losing territory or status and power were Turkey, the Netherlands, France, Sweden, and

Spain.

State competition manifested itself not only in political power and territorial acquisition but in economic matters. Economic conflicts fueled wars and were a big part

110 in any war and subsequent treaty. The mercantilist ideology of system as the British proponent Thomas Munn described it in 1622 was the chief economic engine. Each state or nation subscribed to the mercantilist system until the time of Adam Smith and the

American Revolution. The Netherlands was an exception as they defended trade in a mercantilist way while advocating free trade with all. Mercantilists argued that the interest of a nation would be strengthened by powerful governmental intervention in order to protect home industries by implementing tariffs, by increasing foreign trade, by creating monopolies, by a balance of exports over imports and with the accumulation of money in the government’s coffers. Governments became so protectionist that there was constant friction and sea battles between contending parties over markets and supplying colonies. The French and Indian War, it will be remembered, was a world war in order to defend or take over important colonial possessions that were a part of the mercantilist system of the contending countries. However, after 1763, the North American British

Colonies increasingly worked against the mercantilist policies of the mother country.

QUESTIONS: 1. What do the terms balance of power and compensation mean?

2. Why are treaties important and what did specific treaties do to change things? 3. Are diplomatic relations important between countries? How so? 4. Identify the ascending and descending nations in the power spectrum. Why were some winners and others losers?

FURTHER READING: Henry Kissinger. Diplomacy New York: A Touchstone Book, Simon & Schuster,

1994.

111 ECONOMICS & HISTORY

Gary K. Pranger

PROPERTY

Do not remove thy neighbor’s boundary stone set up by your predecessors in the

inheritance you receive in the land the Lord your God is giving you to possess.

Deuteronomy 19:14 (NIV)

WEALTH & POVERTY

The wealth of the rich is their fortified city, but poverty is the ruin of the poor.

Proverbs 10:15 (NIV)

LABOR

By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground

since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.

Genesis 3:19 (NIV)

In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, we command you, brothers, to keep away

from every brother who is idle and does not live according to the teaching you

received from us. For you yourselves know how you ought to follow our example.

We were not idle when we were with you, nor did we eat anyone’s food without

paying for it. On the contrary, we worked night and day, laboring and toiling so

that we would not be a burden to any of you. We did this, not because we do not have the right to such help, but in order to make ourselves a model for you to follow.

112 For even when we were with you, we gave you this rule: “If a man will not work, he

shall not eat.”

2 Thessalonians 3: 6-10

MONEY

For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. Some people, eager for money,

have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.

1 Timothy 6:10 (NIV)

TAXATION

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar

Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.

Luke 2:1 (KJV)

Here we need to introduce some of the basic theories and practices in the history of economics in order to understand the historical movements and arguments. There are four of them: Merchant Capitalism, Mercantilism, Modern Capitalism and Marxism.

One can see that capitalism has been divided and presented in different eras and the first three have existed and overlapped throughout the world’s history. One only needs to read Solomon’s writings in the Old Testament to understand that capitalism and mercantilism played a part in his absolutist empire. Communism has actually appeared in ancient times in various experiments by peasant reformers such as in China but this has never continued for very long. Let us explore the four modes of economics.

113 MERCHANT CAPITALISM

Originally, in Ancient and Medieval times, economics was conceived as the science or art of household management, concerned largely with the acquisition by the family of its supply of consumable goods and with the thrifty management of its resources. As one reads the Old Testament one can see that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Job and many more were all concerned with household and agricultural economic management. The labor power involved in the domestic production of wealth was largely that of the household’s slaves. Though production in independent artisans existed, and though retail trade within the community and commerce between cities flourished, these were not thought to be subjects of concern as to how they should operate as in the study of economics.

By the eighteenth century, the science of economics became transformed into the much broader study of national wealth.

The phrase, “Political Economy” was created that indicated that economic questions became matters of public policy and this is one of the chief concerns of government. As the study of economics broadened such subjects as labor, money, trade, commerce, industry, taxation raised problems and involved considerations that had not been thought of in ancient economic thought. The nature of property, the role of wealth and poverty in human life, and to some extent, the function of money received attention from ancient writers such as Solomon in Proverbs and Ecclesiastes to medieval authors, as well as modern writers, though their approach to such subjects is very different. For example, the notion of capital – both capital goods in the form of instruments of production and financial capital (monetary holdings) – does not enter into the ancient discussion of property, wealth, or industry. Moreover, such matters as the distribution of wealth, the

114 division of labor, free trade, and state control or regulation of economic processes are barely mentioned, if at all. However, as Ferdinand Braudel and other historians have taught us, the economic activity of merchants and traders covered a vast network of relationships and cultures within and underneath the political affairs of empires, tribes, and peoples from ancient times until the 16th Century.

This “Merchant Capitalism,” as we will call it, existed from Bible times until the

Portuguese and Dutch trade explorations. The study of political economy was once regarded as a branch of moral philosophy, along with ethics and politics, dealing with the questions of value and policy and laying down prescriptions about what ought to be done with regard to the production, exchange, and distribution of wealth. Therefore, Solomon,

Plato, Aristotle, Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Stewart Mill, Adam Smith, Robert

Malthus, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels all studied economic matters and how this relates to the pursuit of happiness, virtue, vice, justice and rights, and law and government.

MERCANTILISM

Mercantilism arose in Europe with the decline of feudalism. This theory taught that the economic interests of the nation could be strengthened by the government by protection of home industries, as through tariffs, by increased foreign trade, as through monopolies, and by a balance of exports over imports with a consequent accumulation of money for the home economy. As minister of finance, Jean Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683) developed the first national economy of the modern age. This state guided economy included statistical planning of the budget and regularized book -keeping. Mercantilism or Colbertism, then created the financial basis for the development of absolutism, because

115 customs duties, direct (the Taille) and indirect (excise) taxes provided the state with profits to maintain the army, the administration, and aristocratic court life. According to the concept of the day, wealth consisted of money. This is not as obvious as it sounds.

Note in Bible times wealth was most often associated with land holdings, farm animals, servants, and agricultural production. However, mercantilism aimed at a favorable balance of trade through the export of valuable finished products - luxury and fashion articles, glasswares, perfumes, porcelain, wine, rum, etc. Consequently, the following things were done: elimination of interior customs duties, development of roads and canals, establishment of state monopolies, subvention of manufactures - large craft enterprises with division of labor – like the making of ocean going sailing ships. To make mercantilist policy work the use of colonies was important. They were supposed to send raw materials to the “mother” country and the mother country would send finished products back to the colonies for sale. Colonies were not intended to make their own finished products. The state promoted navigation and trade associations. For example, with the North American colonies Britain instituted a number of navigation acts in which the colonies were to trade only in British goods, using British ships which would call on

British ports, all for the monetary good of the mother country. While mercantilism promoted commerce and the crafts and thereby increased the prosperity of the middle class, the peasants either as farm laborers or unskilled labor were not stimulated to increase their production. In other words, the common laborers got very little from the whole system and were not paid much.

116 CAPITALISM

Capitalism in its modern phase began with Adam Smith (1723-1790), the first academic economist, who wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776. This book became the bible of modern capitalistic economics. It taught that self-interest and free enterprise were the essentials. The “hidden hand” or self interest is demonstrated by my wanting to make money and in so doing I run a business that produces goods or provides services of high quality at affordable prices. Thus, I make money satisfying my self- interest but in so doing provide goods and services that are desired by the consumer. Thus the consumer’s self interest is satisfied. Each individual will then serves the public and the state with their own self-interest. Together, the producer and consumer in the free, unhindered market help to build each other up and also the surrounding community and country by building up the business, improving surroundings and providing more employment, and through taxes, tithing, and gifts (or philanthropy). We are working to build each other up in a capitalistic society. However, because of the fallen nature of man both producer and consumer have to be safeguarded by law which makes sure the producer is not taking advantage of the consumer, or the consumer is not stealing from the producer. In addition, the factory owners, landowners, and producers must pay their workers justly and look out for their welfare. Thus, Christian ethics must be maintained for a healthy economy.

Capitalism teaches that all or most of the means of production and distribution, as land, factories, railroads, businesses, etc. are privately owned and operated for profit. In its purist form all businesses are or were fully competitive with little or no government intervention or control. However, this led to a tendency toward a concentration of wealth

117 into the hands of a few people and in its later phase to the growth of great corporations which monopolized business, increased government intervention, and thus, government control and regulation came into place and became necessary.

Originally, Adam Smith went to France to study economic life and planning. In

France, Physiocrats also pushed and studied free enterprise capitalism like Jacques

Turgot, the finance minister for the French government. Physiocrats believed in the importance of agriculture as the prime economic activity over and against industrial production and development. To the French economists farmers produced necessary food from nature that outweighed the profits that came from industrialization that produced only trifles.

However, Smith’s, The Wealth of Nations became a best seller after it was published in 1776 and read by those in government. The government of Great Britain moved away from mercantilism to free-enterprise capitalism. Amongst those intellectuals who helped lay down economic policy from theory were Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas

Malthus, James Mill and John Stewart Mill. The latter three were on the board of the

British East India Company. Industrialism proved its profitability, and it improved the infrastructure, society and even improved agriculture by providing new tools and know- how to maximize land use and yields.

Thomas Malthus was a non- practicing clergymen in the Church of England and an economic theorist. He held that as societies developed the population would multiply while agriculture and the over burdened land would not be able to produce any more than it had in the past. Farming production could only increase at best “arithmetically” while

118 population multiplied as every married couple produced anywhere from 2 to 10 children.

Thus society would automatically produce a population crisis and certain disaster.

David Ricardo, was a stockbroker, a member of Parliament, and a Jew, who was considered an economic theorist on a par with Smith. He theorized that with a population explosion and the availability of laborers for the factories and fields wages would automatically lower to subsistence levels. Thus, given this situation in a free enterprise system, factory and property owners would find it easy to replace sick, hurt, and ineffectual workers and pay them a low wage. This was called the “Iron Law of Wages” or the “labor theory of value.” The more workers compete for the existing number of jobs the more the owner can dictate what he will pay the workers and even in what conditions they will do the work. In an opposite situation where workers are in higher demand then their pay would go up and their conditions improve.

A situation occurred from 1845 to 49 that illustrated the problems of a totally free capitalist-enterprise system with no interference from the state. English landlords owned most of the land in Ireland. The Irish rented the land from the English landlords. They grew two kinds of crops; grain for the landlord to pay the rent and potatoes to feed themselves. The profit from the grain went to the English landlords. However, in 1845,

Ireland received little rain and this damaged the potato crop. The next year, 1846, as it rained a parasite attacked the potato crop and destroyed it. The Irish starved and a million and a half people died out of a population of 9 million. During this time the

English landlords still demanded the grain crop to pay for the Irish rents and to make their profit. Grain shipments to England had to go with armed guards. The British government refused to do anything to help the starving Irish because this would upset the

119 free-enterprise system and they assumed that the conditions would right themselves naturally eventually.

In sympathy for the Irish, the British government did rescind the “Corn Laws.” The

Corn laws had been a protectionist measure set up by the mercantilist minded government in the 1700’s. It had remained on the books and was meant to safe-guard

British farmers so as to keep grain prices high so they could make a profit. This made food expensive in Great Britain. The Corn Laws made the cost of imported grain and food high so as to prohibit these products from outside of Great Britain from flooding the market and thus making the price of grain and food go down. When Parliament voted to do away with the Corn Laws, the prices on grain and food went down so the poor could now buy it. However, this did not help the starving Irish who had no money at all.

Thus, the inequities of free enterprise capitalism came to be seen more clearly every time there was a downturn, recession or depression in western economies through the

1800’s to the 1900’s. Only in the 20th century would governments see the necessity of interfering with the normal free-enterprise capitalist economic processes by providing aid and assistance in times of crisis.

The advent of the United States and Canada made European emigration attractive because there was no population problem or food crisis and land was free and abundant for a century. Free-enterprise capitalism nearly became a religion in the growth of the

United States. Capitalism and Christianity meshed to create “the work ethic” that has become foundational in American culture.

120 COMMUNISM

“All the believers were together and had everything in common. Selling their

possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.” Acts 2: 45,46 (NIV)

“All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of his

possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had…There were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned lands or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the Apostles feet, and it was distributed to

anyone who had need.” Acts 4:32-35 (NIV)

Marxism, Socialism, Communism are terms that generally have come to mean the same thing. Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883), a German social philosopher and economist who played a role in the revolution of 1848 in the Rhineland and along with other theorists created modern socialism and communism. Socialism means the ownership and operation of the means of production and distribution by society or the community rather than by private individuals. All members of society or the community share voluntarily in the work and the products. In Communism the community owns all of the property, not the government or private individuals. For Marx, Engels, Lenin, and

Stalin and others who we will study later it was supposed to be a classless and stateless society and the equal distribution of goods, and to be achieved by revolutionary and dictatorial, rather than gradual means. The communist states in our history in the 20th

Century professed to be socialist states working toward a perfect communist society that was the last stage of development toward the perfect world order of peace and harmony.

121 These socialist states professed to be working toward this stage by means of state planning and control of the economy and utilizing a one party political structure with an emphasis on the requirements of the state rather than on individual liberties.

“Gradual” socialists and communist politicians and thinkers desired in the past to work toward communism by gradually introducing legislation to nationalize industries and expand the role of the government in economic affairs. However, nations that have implemented such reforms have not become totalitarian in their methods or in the reality of daily life as hard-line Marxist countries have in the past.

Ideally, socialism and communism were based on Enlightenment thinking and the humanistic idea that humans are good or at least neutral by nature and are capable of sharing and sharing alike. They only require a certain amount of education or re- education. Marx had read the Bible and had considered theology before rejecting

Christianity and accepting atheism and the secular ideas of the day. Marxism is a secular idealization based on the notion conveyed in Acts 2 and 4 where the early Christians had all things in common and shared what they had voluntarily. Marx did not believe in God or Christ or Christianity and he certainly did not believe that only God could bring this kind of society about. However, some Christians in the 19th and 20th centuries called their version of this “communalism” so as not to confuse their Christian and economic beliefs with Communism. Marx was an atheist and materialist who believed that with the proper training man and mankind alone could bring Communism about and thereby ending all the strife and problems in history. In his thought all religion was nonsense and therefore forbidden.

122 Marxist communism went to the forefront in the minds of its believers and in history and in reality it destroyed much of society in the process. As Bible readers and Christ followers we recognize that all humans are evil, fallen, and depraved by nature – inherently sinful and in need of Christ’s saving grace and redemption. Only in this redeemed state can mankind hope to share and share alike. In the idealized state that

Marx had in mind mankind would become so reformed, “by themselves,” that there would be no more need for police, prisons, or war. He envisioned a “secular millenium” without God.

QUESTIONS: 1. What does “economics” mean? 2. Describe and explain

Merchant Capitalism, Mercantilism, Capitalism, and Communism. 3. Does the

Bible subscribe to any one of these theories? Why or why not?

FURTHER READING:

Karl Marx. Das Kapital. Published in English, 1886.

Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto. 1848.

Adam Smith. The Wealth of Nations. 1776.

123

MARX & MARXISM: IDEAL AND REALITY

Karl Marx brushed aside “utopian” ideas as sentimental and unrealistic; in this he shared the opinion of most of the capitalists of his time. Marx’s study of history told him that events are shaped by underlying economic developments, rather than by idealistic reformers. He believed that these developments were leading toward the collapse of capitalism. Therefore, he insisted that the proper task of workers and intellectuals was to understand the trend of history and to participate in its forward movement. While accepting some of the observations and principles of Robert Owen and Charles Fourier, he felt that their appeals distracted people form the “correct” course of thought and action.

It was in this sense that Marx and his followers regarded his own doctrine as

“scientific.” Marx set forth certain theories and sought to prove them by the evidence of history. He was not primarily an inventor of ideas; his achievement was a grand synthesis. Materialist, rationalist, libertarian, and revolutionist, Marx was an heir of the

Enlightenment – who drew upon the leading scientific, economic, and philosophic ideas of the 19th century. But, reflecting also the romantic spirit of his age, Marx’s teachings contain strong elements of faith and feeling as well as of reason and science.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was born in the Rhineland (Germany), to a middle class

Jewish family. The youthful Karl attended the universities of Bonn and Berlin. His father (a Lutheran convert) was a lawyer, and the son began to prepare for the same profession. Soon, however, Karl became attracted to the study of history and philosophy

124 and would have liked to qualify himself for a professorship. But his chances of winning a university appointment were slim as this was the period of conservative reaction in

Germany. Caught up by the revolutionary stirrings of the 1840’s, he turned instead to journalism and pamphleteering. With his lifelong friend and partner, Friedrich Engels,

Marx organized revolutionary groups and wrote the Communist Manifesto of 1848. After participating in the insurrections of that year in the Rhineland, he escaped to London, where he remained for the rest of his life (40 Years). He was one of the first critics to stress the international character of working-class movements -–thus placing himself in opposition to the mounting spirit of nationalism in Europe. From London Marx continued his association with revolutionary movements in various countries, helping to found the First International in 1864. He spent long hours in the British Museum studying history and economics and writing.

The most famous product of his labors, Das Kapital, appeared in part before his death. Engels completed the last two volumes. It consists chiefly of theory and analysis and is closely related to the writings of classical liberal economists such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo. But Marx scorned their ignorance of history. However, he did respect their understanding of the dynamics of 19th century capitalism. Working largely from their stated “laws” and principles, he concluded that all economic value is produced by human labor and that the capitalist unjustly takes over a portion of this value. The system of capitalism, he claimed, promised nothing but misery to the laborers and contains contradictions that ensure its own destruction. But Marx’s economic conclusions were perhaps the least original, least proven and least important of his ideas.

His enormous influence would come from the fact that he was able to join his criticism of

125 capitalism with a revolutionary program based on a unified view of history, politics, and morals.

The philosopher Hegel gave Marx the key to his general view. History is an unceasing process, said Hegel, governed at any moment by the struggle between a dominant idea and its opposing idea (the dialectical process of thesis, antithesis, synthesis). This was a relatively simple explanation that made order and purpose out of the bewildering tangle of events. Marx was excited by Hegel’s dialectical principle, but he had no use for the notion that ideas are the prime forces in history. After much study and reflection, he concluded that the “mode of production” (the economic structure) is the main determining force in a given society; its opposing force arises from technological changes that are no longer suitable to the established economic structure. In Marx’s own words:

In the social production which men carry on they enter into indefinite relations that are independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of the material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society – the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production in material life determines the general character of social, political, and spiritual processes of life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.

Thus did Marx “turn Hegel upside down.” The flow of history and the growth of ideas and institutions, Marx thought, are all shaped by changes in the mode of production. And this evolution had passed through four principal stages: “The Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois methods of production.”

Engels later sought to modify the rigidity of Marx’s economic determinism

(sometimes called “historical materialism”). What he meant, explained Engels, was that

126 the economic factor is “the strongest, most elemental, and most decisive.” But to admit the influence of various factors is to weaken the claim of economic determinism. Even non-Marxist historians agree that the system of production is one important factor among the “determinants” of a given culture.

Marx saw the “class struggle” as part of historical materialism – a view that had special significance because it related to the actual struggles of working people in the 19th century. Each mode of production, he said, serves a particular “ruling” class, which takes advantage of its opposing “exploited” class. The ancient world had its masters and slaves; the feudal age, its nobles and serfs; and the capitalist age, its bourgeois and proletarians. Marx believed that the ruling class of each stage provides laws and institutions to guarantee its continued exploitation of the opposing class. The state itself thus becomes a mechanism of suppression. The executive of the 19th century capitalist state, he declared, was “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.”

Social revolutions occur, according to Marx, when a new mode of production – taking shape within the framework of the old bursts the bonds of established laws and relationships. The agents of the revolution are the “new” class, which, in time, becomes the ruling class. Thus, he argued, the bourgeoisie had promoted the “Liberal” revolutions, thereby paving the way for a new economic order – and for a new ruling class. But the hour had struck for the bourgeoisie, as it had earlier for the European nobility. The potential of expanding technology could not be realized within the structure of private capitalism; and the capitalist system of production, hit by increasingly severe depressions, was stumbling toward its end. In accordance with the dialectic principle, the

127 old system had already brought into existence the class that would overthrow it and build a new order upon the ruins. This class, the proletariat, was being drawn into the industrial centers in ever- larger numbers. All it needed in order to help history along was Marxist instruction and organization.

Though Marx had bitter feelings toward the bourgeoisie and regarded its exploitation of the proletariat as the most brutal in history, he felt that it had played, in preceding centuries, a constructive and progressive role. This was in keeping with his (and Hegel’s) view of history as moving irresistibly toward higher and higher goals of human fulfillment. Marx also approved the liberal revolutions, whose results were chiefly political. The freedoms gained were of primary benefit to the entrepreneurial class, but they also increased the opportunities of the lower class to work for SOCIAL revolution.

Political freedom was meaningless to the hungry and homeless, thought Marx, but it was a step toward achieving a new order of production that could provide a decent living for all – and liberate the worker from humiliation and servitude. Only after those changes had been brought about could individuals realize their full potential, the goal Marx desired for EVERYONE.

Marx predicted that the mounting clashes between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie would lead to the triumph of the working class. This victory would bring an end to the historic class struggle, for all individuals would then be included in ONE body of workers. Dismantling the old social order and taking over the means of production would be carried out under a temporary “dictatorship of the proletariat.” This would be followed, in turn, by an intermediate period of “socialism,” during which individuals

128 would “work according to their ability and receive according to their output.” Socialism would lead eventually to pure “communism.”

Once COMMUNISM had been reached, the state would “wither away,” Marx believed, because without a class struggle there would be no reason for the existence of the state. Thus would come into being for the first time in civilized history “true” liberty for all. In the vaguely outlined communist society voluntary associations would plan and carry out production. Individuals would work according to their ABILITIES and receive according to their NEEDS. Private persuasion and restraint would replace police, prisons, and war.

Close, observers of human nature, from God in the Bible, to Aristotle and Augustine through Hobbes and Voltaire, would say that this earthly paradise is highly unrealistic.

Even if we grant a measure of scientific truth to Marx’s analysis of the past, his vision in the FUTURE is a romantic one. If accepted at all, it must be accepted on FAITH.

Indeed, the followers of Marx have found in his doctrines a kind of religion; they have called it the RELIGION OF MAN.

Their “god,” the prime mover, is “historical materialism,” and Marx is its prophet.

There are Marxist apostles and saints – as well as despised heretics. The sacred books are his writings, which are defended by “dialectical” theologians. The “visible church” is the PARTY, and true believers must have unquestioning faith in its gospel and its works.

The Day of Judgment is the day of revolution. The Marxist heaven is the classless society to come.

This analogy with conventional religion is intended to suggest the emotional quality of Marxism and to stress the fact that it presents a total view of humanity and the

129 universe. This is a crucial point to grasp if we are to understand the appeal of Marxist doctrine over the past century. At a time when the foundations of Christianity and liberalism were being challenged, Marx created a new world-view related to the main facts, theories, and hopes of the new INDUSTRIAL age. Its promise appealed to the working poor, but it appealed also to many intellectuals who felt alienated from industrialism and who were looking for some kind of total reorientation. Partial critiques and actions based on a mix of traditional values (as in utopianism) left such people unsatisfied. Marxism offered a unified view and psychological equivalent to traditional religion, and it did not seem to contain the shortcomings, errors and contradictions of other belief systems. Marxist belief then became a principal competitor to Christian belief and Lockean liberal beliefs.

INTERPRETERS OF MARX: REVOLUTIONARY AND EVOLUTIONARY

Marx had considered two possible paths to the overthrow of capitalism: one by legal means, the other by force. He did not exclude either, and he recognized the power that an extension of the voting rights might hold out to the working class. But he leaned toward the view that the ruling class was unlikely to surrender its property under democratic processes and that a resort to violence must ultimately be expected.

After Marx’s death in 1883, the capitalist states showed no signs of tottering, and most socialist workers tended to make their peace with the existing system. True, a small group of Marxists stuck by the “hard” line, scorning “legalism” and “gradualism.” But the larger group recognized that such a stand would not appeal to the bulk of workers.

They stated frankly that Marxist doctrine would have to be REVISED it if was to continue as a major force.

130 The “revisionists” mapped a much longer (and different) road to the ideal society.

They stressed democracy, parliamentary methods, and class cooperation as means of achieving further reforms. Eduard Bernstein, a German socialist, was the leading spokesman for this view. (The “Fabian” socialists of England were Non-Marxists, but held a similar position.) The broad term “social democratic” can be applied to most of the labor parties in European politics after 1890; they represented the “evolutionary” wing among the heirs of Marx. The “revolutionary” wing remained significant only in

Eastern Europe, where the absence of effective representative government prevented change by peaceful, legal methods. It was there, in a relatively backward country,

Russia, that the revolutionary Marxists would achieve the first great victory of socialism.

ANARCHISM

A different sort of attack upon the established order that went from the 19th century into the 20th century took the form of ANARCHISM. This view holds that any use of

AUTHORITY – economic, religious, or political – is an unjustified interference with the individual. Believing that human beings are basically good, the anarchists, like Marxists, claim that voluntary, harmonious relationships could be achieved among individuals if the power of the state were removed. Some, like the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy and the

American essayist, Henry David Thoreau, were anarchists only in a philosophical sense; they firmly opposed the use of violence as a means of realizing their idea. But others pursued what they considered to be the direct and necessary route to the abolition of government: assassination of government officials, terrorism, and insurrection.

131 Though these anarchist ideas were first expressed in Western Europe, it was Mikhail

Bakunin, a Russian nobleman, who exerted the largest influence. Bakunin died in 1876 but his followers succeeded in killing Tsar Alexander II of Russia, President Sadi Cornot of France, King Humbert I of Italy, and President William McKinley of the United

States. Such acts of terror horrified the powerful everywhere, but failed to produce an effective movement for social change or for the abolition of state power. Nevertheless, these activists and their acts were forerunners of terrorist killings in the 20th century.

QUESTIONS: 1. Who was Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and what did they believe about society and philosophy? 2. Define Marxism as Marx would have thought of it and also in its ideal form once communism came about. 2. Define

Marxism in its reality as it has played out in history.

FURTHER READING: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Bantam

Classic (1888) 2004.

Paul Johnson. Intellectuals. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1988.

Paul Johnson. Modern Times. News York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991.

Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent. 1987.

132 THE 18TH CENTURY ENGLISH NOVEL

Carl Hamilton

In the 18th Century the center of gravity in society was recognizably moving from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie (or the middle class). Mercantilism was an economic reflection of this trend. Emergence of a literary vehicle for bourgeois values – the novel

– marked a cultural landmark. The middle class was interested in its own image, as earlier the aristocracy had been interested in its own exploits and foibles as reflected in epics. As literacy spread, novelists held up the mirror of life – the novel – to reflect back to English citizens their strengths and weaknesses.

To find the ancestors of the English novel we must go to Medieval Spain and the

Spanish picaresque tales such as Lazarillo de Tormes and Don Quixote. Medieval poetry evolved toward this “Poetic Romance” that was meant to teach values and commitments.

Picaresque tales did not present a coherent story but there were lots of episodes. Usually a rogue wends his way through society having or telling about one experience after another. Don Quixote was the first modern novel with a story line that was inconsistent but it had a consistent character. The French prose romance was the next in line toward the English novel. This became a new way to communicate moral and intellectual values, changes and new fashions of thought. The Italian Novella was another ancestor of the English novel and the best examples of this were the Decameron and The

Adventure of Master FJ. The Renaissance also dug up the pastoral romances of the

Hellenistic Greeks set in long narrative poems such as the Illiad and The Odyssey. These were translated and put into new editions.

133 Eventually the English took story telling to another level as Thomas Malory (died

1471) wrote the first prose account in English of the legend of King Arthur in Morte

Darthur. Sir John Mandeville authored a romanticized book of travels in the14th century. Many experiments and forms appeared to explore the possibilities of this genre.

Eventually John Bunyan (1628-88) wrote Pilgrim’s Progress and the novel was on its way toward a more formulaic mode.

The distinguishing characteristics of the true novel are plot, characters and the illusion of reality. The plot must be unified and plausible. As the sequences are developed they are made to be believable within the confines of the story. It is not necessary to really depict reality but the story must captivate the reader so that they will accept the premise and the reality that is presented. The characters must be distinguishable or believable and sharply individualized. There must be an illusion of reality. Somehow the story must bring “verisimilitude” or truth-likeness into being and somehow must reflect how life was lived and involving middle classes lives and life.

Daniel Defoe (1659-1731) is considered to be the founder of the “modern” English novel. His novels used a dominant, unifying theme with a serious thesis. He even tried to pass his fiction off as fact as he utilized a middle class, first person narrator. In his most famous novel Robinson Crusoe (1719), a middle class doctor is plunged into the problem of being isolated on an island all by himself and he must learn how to survive.

The Journal of the Plague Year was a fictional but realistic diary of the events of the

London Plague of 1666 that killed much of the population. It was so convincing that many thought it was real. However, Defoe was only seven years old in 1666 and could not have kept such an account. Defoe’s novels were written from a middle class point of

134 view and conveyed the values of the middle class. Moll Flanders (1722) was a realistic and sympathetic picture of the life of a lower middle class prostitute. Thus, three things had to be in every novel from this time on: 1) a dominant, unifying theme with a serious thesis, 2) convincing realism, and 3) and it had to be from a middle class point of view.

Thomas Smollet (1721-1771) tried to write as the eye sees and was considered a

“photographic naturalist.” He was noted for his painstaking observation of the senses. In his early years he worked as a surgeon’s mate aboard his majesty’s ships. He became a surgeon and at the same time pursued a writing career and helped found the Critical

Review, a literary journal. He wrote the first important novel of the sea in The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker (1771). This novel did more than just entertain. It helped to reform the rough and brutal behavior so characteristic at sea on British ships. This book along with Richard Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast, and Herman Melville’s, Moby

Dick and Billy Budd did much to lobby for reform in the sailor’s life at sea. Here Smollet wrote the first character novel, that is using and deeply describing and developing a number of eccentric and humorous characters. Smollet helped to develop the novel of ideas and his work also foreshadowed the Gothic novel.

Laurence Sterne (1713-1786) came from a line of Anglican clergymen but in his case he took his holy orders in order to secure an income. He became the irreverent reverend.

His major and only work of significance was a nine- volume novel called The Adventures of Tristam Shandy that was written from 1760 to 1767. It is characterized by eccentricities and naughtiness and was a frontal attack on the order of the 18th century and the Enlightenment era by communicating that life is not orderly. Sterne argued that the rigidity of the 18th century did not allow for the recognition of isolation, loneliness

135 and the alienation of people, and there was no way to communicate these feelings in a disorderly world. This tale criticized all values and even Don Quixote and tried to disorder an orderly world by playing with the themes of illusion vs. reality and disorder vs. order. Moreover, it introduced the “Stream of Consciousness” technique so valued by modernist poets and writers in the early 20th century. In this book there are blank pages, reversed chapters and purposeful, blatant inconsistencies.

In the 18th century there were two forms of the novel. There was the novel of sentiment and feeling where there is a lot of crying and weeping people. Oliver

Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield (1762) and Henry MacKenzie, The Man of Feeling

(1771) were two examples that carry human sentiment to its highest form.

The second form is the gothic novel where magic, mystery, and chivalry are the chief characteristics. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764) was the first of this type and gave the word “gothic” to the genre. All this was carried to new heights by such novels as Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), M.G. “Monk” Lewis, The

Monk and Mary Godwin Shelley, Frankenstein (1818). Monk Lewis became known for his novel that combined chivalry and horror. Mary Shelley’s character, Dr. Frankenstein, is a young student who creates a monster that destroys him. This story became so famous that the word “Frankenstein” can be designated to anyone who is destroyed by his or her own creation or that becomes dangerous to its creator. Generations of writers have used this theme in the gothic genre and the genre of “science fiction” for which the

Frankenstein monster became the forerunner.

Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) was a printer by profession - the “Master of the

Stationer’s Company,” the central printing arm for Parliament that also controlled and

136 censored the printing all over England. Richardson was not a novelist to begin with but was asked to print letters to serve as models for letter writers. After a while he got the idea to have one central character write the letters that tell a story, and thus the novel,

Clarissa was conceived and written from 1747 to 1748. This story grew to 2200 pages and seven volumes. It is meant to be the correspondence of Clarissa Anna Howe who does not seem to live life so much as spend all her time writing what becomes 547 letters.

In any case this tremendous and ponderous story contributed to the novel of personality, sensibility, moral conflict in society, concentrated unity and tragic intensity.

In Clarissa there are four recurrent character types given to us in two central characters. There is Clarissa 1) the chaste woman and 2) the Protestant martyr, and

Richard Lovelace, 3) the impeccable gentleman who turns into 4) the suave and heartless woman killer. The characters are well rounded and believable. The plot revolves around a central antagonist who is an aristocrat who tries time and again to seduce the protagonist

- Clarissa. Her personality is at the center of the novel and the story becomes one of moral conflict. Eventually he succeeds and rapes her. The attack is degenerating and she dies of a broken heart trying to keep her moral values. He wins physically but she wins morally. Clarissa becomes a martyr and saint of Protestant, middle class values. That the bad guy is an aristocrat is not by accident. In Clarissa and later Pamela, Richardson was trying to teach and reaffirm middle class values to his middle class readers over against higher class immorality.

Henry Fielding (1707-1754) was an aristocrat and a judge and he took the opposite view of Richardson. Fielding did come from an inherited, aristocratic background and was educated as a lawyer and a judge. He started out writing political dramatic plays but

137 was put down for doing them and fired. When he turned to novel writing his contributions included the first avowed or epic novels in English. He created the first genuine novelistic portrait of standard English life and the first to depict the panorama of an age. Moreover, he wrote the first critical theory of a novel.

Fielding did not appreciate or like Richardson’s works and so he countered Pamela with Shamela. Shamela is a satirical novel about a wench who schemes to get what she wants and therefore the males in this tale, even as aristocrats, are the moral ones.

Fielding is best known for Tom Jones (1749), an 800 page epic, about an innocent, naïve, rootless orphan who floats through English society. As Tom touches peoples’ lives they seduce and abuse him but he does not judge them. The theme is that bad things and times and feelings may happen but his faith in humanity is not dampened. Goodness will win out. Tom Jones 1) implies that the world is not what it seems, 2) it teaches the

Enlightenment themes of tolerance and the natural goodness of man and 3) it reveals a tight, well developed plot.

QUESTIONS: 1) How did the “novel” develop and where did it come from? 2) What are the distinguishing characteristics of the novel? 3) What three characteristics did

Defoe’s novel have? 4) Recount the various authors and describe them and their works.

5) What are the important things the novel brings to readers since the 18th century?

FURTHER READING:

Any of the above novels.

138 METHODISM

Harold J. Paul

INTRODUCTION

John Wesley led an internal movement within the Anglican Church and he never left this church. Early industrialism in the 1700’s had brought on urbanization, or at the least

“villagization” of the English populace. This populace was left to its own devices and many tended toward wickedness and debilitating social decay. Wesley’s leadership led to spiritual regeneration and social uplift as well as to establishment of a Christian institution, the Methodist Church. Wesley’s movement provided a haven for intelligent middle and lower class Englishmen who could not accept Enlightenment ideas and rationalistic deism as the aristocratic and upper classes had.

There are four parts to this section. First, that religious toleration was improving as

England reached the early 18th Century. It was not religious equality because by the Act of Toleration of 1689, Catholics and separatists (nonconformist Protestants) could still not participate in politics. But, there was a genuine toleration that allowed all of these groups to worship more or less freely. Second, religious influence decayed into mere form and ceremony. Third, Methodism arose as a Christian revival movement within

Oxford University and the Anglican Church. Fourth, Methodism had a marked influence in the reform of religion, society and politics and is credited with stabilizing English society.

THE METHODISTS

Actually, the removal of persecution resulted in the growth of secularizing tendencies. There were two reasons for this. One, because religion was not now an

139 integral part of the politics, economics and social life as it had been earlier. Two, religious conviction declined as the upper classes scorned it and advertised their worldly lifestyles to the rest of society.

There was a decline of centralized power in the government. Rural England was governed by Justices of the Peace who were appointed by the Crown. But they governed largely on the advice of the local shire gentry. Henry Fielding, the novelist, was one such justice of the peace. Thus local government in England was becoming more important and independent of the king but was represented in the institution of Parliament. But bribery, patronization and corruption made rule by Parliament uneven. Disregard for the law was on the increase.

It was said: “Robbery was …on a fearful scale in the streets of London, even by daylight. House breaking was of frequent occurrence by night; and every road leading to the metropolis was beset by bands of reckless highwaymen who carried their depredations into the very heart of the town…. On one day we are told that ‘all the stage coaches coming from Surrey to London were robbed by highwaymen.’”

The death penalty was prescribed routinely: “At the Old Bailey Sessions held during

January in the year 1718, among those sentenced to death were one for murder, five for robberies on the highway, three women for breaking open houses in the day time, a boy for shoplifting, and a man stealing a woman’s pocket book.”

A few more illustrations of conditions are these: In London, as late as 1751, one out of eight died from gin drinking. During the period 1740-42, the burials were twice the number of baptisms. With the advancement of the land enclosure movement, thousands of people were forced to move from the countryside to the slums around the mining and

140 manufacturing districts. These new districts remained without governmental representation or Church guidance.

By the mid-1700’s there was a general decline in the interest in religion. It seemed that “the mass of the nation was either actively or passively Christian, accepting the religion that it was taught. The lowest (and largest) strata of society had been taught nothing at all.” Thus the lower and middle classes were stagnating in matters of religion.

The official history of the Church of England – the Anglican Church – recognized its failure in ministering to the people. Few clergymen actually lived in the parish districts that they presided over. Moreover, Anglican clergymen were paid poorly – over half of them (5,597 to be exact) were paid less than 50 pounds per year.

Of course, there could be no reform to the strict Puritanism of Cromwell and yet there was a need to check the forces of political, social and religious disintegration, and to guide the more explosive elements of the national scene into more constructive and positive channels.

No movement comparable to the French Revolution ever took place in England.

Why was this so? What is it that prevented the political and social radicalism and the destruction of all traditional institutions in England when it happened in France?

Historians such as John Richard Green and William Lecky maintained that Methodism, as a movement, had a determining influence on all of England at this time. In a world facing so many problems as the one we live in, it should be of value to learn that the

Methodist revival did have a beneficial effect on the political, social and religious well being of England.

141 The leaders of the movement came from within the Anglican Church and Oxford

University. John Wesley (1703-1791), his brother Charles Wesley (1708-1788) and

George Whitefield (1714-1770) were the three most important leaders. John Wesley after receiving his master’s degree from Oxford spent two and a half years as assistant pastor to his father at Epworth, the only pastoral experience he ever had. In 1728 he was ordained a priest in the Anglican Church. In 1729 he joined the “Holy Club,” which his brother Charles, George Whitefield and others formed a year earlier, and was at once made its leader. Because of their methodical procedure in meeting, Bible study, prayer, and weekly celebration of the Lord’s Supper, they were dubbed “Methodists.” John

Wesley had accepted the doctrine of justification by faith; yet it had not become to him an experiential fact. Partly in order to attain this, he along with Charles, in 1735, answered the call of the Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts for missionaries to come to Georgia. On his trip across the Atlantic Ocean, during a raging storm John was deeply impressed with the peace and composure witnessed among a band of Moravians who were likewise coming to Georgia. However, their mission was short.

Discouraged and broken in health, Charles returned within a year. John went back to

London in early 1738. In England, he again met some Moravians who challenged his faith. On May 24, 1738, at a Moravian meeting on Aldersgate Street the assurance of salvation came to him in an experience with the Holy Spirit. John felt greatly indebted to, and was greatly influenced by the Moravians, but he was too practical to join their deeply mystical society. George Whitefield and Charles Wesley, both of whom had also undergone deep heart-warming experiences, joined John in a great revival campaign that soon flowed over the borders of England into Scotland, Ireland, and America.

142 Hence, the emphasis of Methodism was on a real heart-felt conversion to Christ.

This inward experience with God would then turn outward and transform one’s life.

Furthermore, the converted person could then help to reform and transform society. In other words, Methodists lived out Christ’s two greatest commandments – to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind and body and to love one’s neighbor as one’s self. The second emphasis, then was in helping one’s fellow man or woman as good Samaritans which accompanied the evangelism. Thus, they helped both rich and poor. In doing this the Wesley brothers remained conservative Englishmen in that they wanted to improve existing institutions in government and the church rather than create new ones. Thus they supported the king and parliament and did not support radicalism. They also wished to evangelize all segments of society from the higher classes and the educated to the lower classes. However, their real successes came in helping and educating the middle and lower classes to help each other and thus help their country.

As the Methodist leadership felt the divine call, they did hold certain ideas. John

Wesley remained truly conservative politically. An example of this is that Wesley did not recognize the right of every man to vote and regarded the mass of people as unfit to be charged with so great a responsibility. This is actually similar to the founding fathers of America who felt those who could exercise their liberty and vote had to be men who were responsible, educated and owned property.

The Methodist leaders were aware of the intellectual movements of the day as well as the political and social problems. They felt that the real problem was that all men were hopelessly lost in sin and only through Jesus Christ would they be saved and restored as individuals created by God with free wills.

143 Wesley had certain ideas about wealth. He stated:

“The love of money,” as we know, “is the root of all evil,” but not the thing itself. The fault does not lie in the money but in them that use it. It may be used ill; and what may not? But it may likewise be used well: it is full as applicable to the best, as to the worst uses.

In other words, Wesley believed that “one should gain all you can, save all you can and give all you can.” In each of these sayings Wesley carefully qualified them to prevent taking advantage either of one’s neighbor or the government. These qualifications were not only to regulate business procedures, but also the kind of work a Methodist was expected to engage in. Such customs as smuggling, robbing wrecked ships, or selling votes at election time, were forbidden. He believed that an individual should work honestly at an honest job. By working hard one can gain, save, and give in a sensible – not a wasteful manner.

METHODS AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS

In their open-air preaching, pioneered by George Whitefield, great crowds came to hear and thousands were converted. These converts were organized into Societies and class meetings. Societies were not organized like the average congregation, but were broken up into small class groups or cell groups of 10 to 12 people. Each member knew the others intimately and all were under the sympathetic supervision and direction of the most energetic person in the group – this person became the class leader. Thus natural leaders were allowed to develop. Also, there was a separation of the sexes into their own respective groups. Each class or cell group studied the Bible, prayed and met each other’s needs. Fifty classes made up a Society. Wesley spent much time visiting them once they were organized. Thus the organization gradually developed into the Methodist

Church from this pattern. Hence, Wesley has come to be known as a great preacher,

144 leader, and organizer. In his own itinerant preaching he traveled chiefly on horseback and covered more than 250,000 miles and preached over 40,000 sermons.

Besides being the preacher and missionary, Wesley became interested in medicine and hospital development in promoting healing and good health. He was a scholar and even an historian who compiled and wrote a history of Christianity with the use of other historians’ accounts in order for his Methodists to understand their place in history.

The leading preachers in the Methodist movement were largely of conservative

Anglican background but were for the most part from the middle class. Their backgrounds might even have been as farmers, fishermen, or manufacturers. Very few of the leaders came from the lower classes. However, lower class Methodists had more social mobility as they cleaned up their lives and asserted their Christianity especially if they became class leaders. At least, lower class converts were able to improve and stabilize their neighborhoods. The fact that middle class and lower class people could participate meant that people could use their gifts, talents and abilities over against people who were merely appointed because of their degree or status. The common component among them was their common spiritual experience in Jesus Christ for salvation and a subsequent knowledge of the Bible.

The results of the Methodist revival and organization are as follows: There was a pronounced effect on the English national community. Reforms were not pronounced from the top down but instead started in countless reformed individuals who then together helped reform the nature and character of their communities. This helped to make both the citizenry and the government leaders more complimentary and thus able to bring about social and political reforms in a more peaceful manner. Methodism was a

145 positive force because reforms of individual and society were voluntary and with this came an easier redistribution of wealth. Hospitals, orphanages, and Sunday Schools were created when none existed before. This helped to stabilize society from the lower classes to the upper class halls.

Methodism expanded in 1775 when Wesley began a series of preaching tours in

Ireland and Scotland. He never returned to America but Thomas Coke was appointed the first superintendent of the American work. Later Francis Asbury was sent to assist him.

In 1800 there were 8,000 class leaders, and 2,000 local preachers. The Methodist circuit rider or preacher often rode 20 to 30 miles on a Sunday and preached two or three times with little pay. Of the class leaders it was said: “Rich or poor, cultured and uneducated, all became ardent propagandists, bent not only on building up local societies but founding groups wherever possible. A poor peddler, or an impoverished widow, or a family servant were instrumental in planting new societies as the appointed evangelists.”

On politics again, usually Wesley refused to comment on political arguments. His quiet patriotic defense of the crown actually stalled the growth of Methodism in America until after the American Revolution. In this he saw the desperate situation in English society as more of a threat than the problems of the American colonies. Wesley did not want the American colonies to revolt and separate from Great Britain just as he did not wish to see a revolution in English society. Thus England owes Wesley and Methodism a debt of gratitude in being just the remedy for society’s ills.

To illustrate this let us turn to three specific case histories in the form of the towns of

Bristol, Newcastle, and Nottingham.

146 BRISTOL

Bristol is one of the historic cities of England. Sea explorers such as John Cabot and traders set out for all parts of the world from here. Into the dark, narrow and filthy streets men came who made their living in the African slave trade. Bristol was notorious for mob violence. Children were maltreated and made to work in the mines. At first Wesley and Whitefield were run out of town by a mob. This mission field took ten years of hard labor. When Whitefield came again in 1736 to preach, the churches in the area welcomed him. But because he began preaching to unchurched miners the status conscious churches turned him out. So he left the comfort of the churches to the streets to preach in February 1739 and quickly drew 10,000 listeners. Many of them were converted.

The practical side of these new teachings was quickly illustrated. Whitefield began visiting New Gate prison to preach to the prisoners. This was in defiance of the Bishop of Bristol. When an epidemic of spotted fever broke out in the city John Wesley came and went house to house ministering to those in need to the peril of his own life. In 1740 when an unexpected frost threw hundreds out of work, he organized his own system of relief and fed 100 to 150 every day during the period of emergency. He even made an effort to help the poor become self-supporting through arranging for them to card and spin their own wool. Whether these efforts succeeded or failed it made ordinary people become conscious that Christianity could meet real needs. The Bristol Society grew eventually to 900 members.

In 1753 the food situation in Bristol became serious again and a riot occurred that necessitated the calling out of troops before it was put down. Several were killed and a

147 number placed in prison. These immediately called for John Wesley to preach to them and found him only too willing to do so. Hence the reputation of the Methodists grew.

In 1756, on the outbreak of the Seven Years War, Wesley offered to raise and support 200 soldiers through the channels of the societies. Individual Methodists were often outstanding in battle, both on sea and land. Captain Webb, later a local preacher in

Bristol, was with General Wolf on the Plains of Abraham. Methodists aboard the

Victory, Lord Nelson’s flag ship, were recognized as the best seamen on board. But their patriotism did not cause them to forget the needs of their enemies, even when they had become prisoners.

NEWCASTLE

Newcastle was an old historic city going back to Roman days. However, in the

1700’s, conditions were appalling. It was said by one evangelist: “So much drunkenness, cursing and swearing, even from the mouths of little children do I never remember to have seen and heard before.” John Wesley began preaching here in 1742 in the open before thousands of people. Revival broke out and a society was organized which numbered as many as 800. A suitable place of worship was organized called the Orphan

House. It was a center for evangelistic activity and served as a home for Wesley’s itinerant helpers in the ministry. It also acted as a place where poor children were educated. Due to the efforts of a Mr. Atmore, the first Sunday School in the area was opened at the Orphan House with an enrollment of 350 members. Sunday Schools from the 1750’s became an increasingly standard feature of all evangelical churches where the young learned how to read by studying the Bible.

148 NOTTINGHAM

Nottingham in 1740 possessed about 10,000 people. In spite of the legend of Robin

Hood and other historical and legendary figures, it was a filthy city and its inhabitants debased. Cockfighting and bull baiting were the favorite amusements of all classes. The marketplace was only partially paved and the south parade a nasty swamp. Bogs and cesspools were left undisturbed. Systems of sewage were not thought of and the science of sanitation was unknown. Hence, dysentery and related diseases were common.

Socially, there was little respect for the law and much violence. Here the gospel was preached and great things began to happen. However, there were times of opposition. A young man who opened his home for the Methodists to worship in was arrested by the mayor and taken to jail. But he did not go alone. Many went with him and they began to sing and worship. They kept this up for so long that the jail keeper was only too glad to arrange for his release. Once again, the Wesley’s came and preached and thousands attended the open -air meetings and a society was organized on June 21, 1743.

In a continuing effort to care for prisoners and the sick, a Methodist hospital was established in Nottingham which Wesley himself inspected and said: “I never saw one (a hospital) so well-ordered: neatness, decency, and common sense shined throughout the whole. I do not wonder that many of the patients recover.”

149 CONCLUSION

The effects on the standard of living and social repercussions were thus. 1) The personal economic growth of the new Christians helped to increase the general wealth of the nation. 2) Methodism represented an inner, other worldly, spiritual change that influenced all outward habits and ways of life. Hence, socially England became a much more stable country as it entered the 1800’s. In this Great Britain was able to alleviate the radical French type of revolution that might have destroyed it.

In other words, Christian revivalism is the answer to society’s ills. When an individual has a spiritual revolution with Christ and then when many such individuals find Christ together they will influence their society. You cannot hide your lamp under a bushel.

After a short illness in London in 1791, John Wesley died at age 87, his last words were: “The Best of all: God is with us.’

QUESTIONS: 1. What were the local conditions like in England in the 1700’s? 2. How did Methodism come about? Who were John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield and how did the come to Christ? 3.How were the Methodists organized and who made up the Societies? 4. How did Methodism help the spiritual, social, economic and political situation in England?

150 FURTHER READING:

Wesley J. Bready. England Before and after Wesley: The Evangelical Revival and

Social Reform. New York: Russell & Russell, 1971.

Mark A Noll. Christians in the American Revolution. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,

1977.

Martin Schmidt. John Wesley: A Theological Biography. 2 vols. Nashville:

Abingdon, 1962-73.

151 THE FIRST GREAT AWAKENING

Gary K. Pranger

From 1607 to the 1650’s the British North American colonies were established.

Anglicans, representatives of the Church of England, brought Christianity to the region of coastal South Carolina and later to all the southern colonies. Puritans brought

Christianity to Massachusetts and Connecticut. In 1620 William Bradford (1590-1657) sailed in the Mayflower and his “Pilgrims” set up Plymouth Plantation. They consecrated

Plymouth Rock to found and preserve a Christian community. They were the first of many English Puritans who came to settle in what would become New England. In 1630

John Winthrop (1588-1649) delivered his sermon “A Modell of Christian Charity,” blessing and charging his “Puritans” to found and develop a “city upon a hill” – a light for Christ for the world to see. These Puritans founded Boston and Massachusetts and

Winthrop became the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

From 1660 to 1760 the population in the American colonies grew from 75,000 to

1,600,000. Immigrants were from England, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands and slaves from Africa. By the time of the American Revolution (1775-1783) only

Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Charleston, and Newport would approach 10,000 in population. There were worries then by ministers that the spreading population would make it difficult to keep church- goers uniform in their Christianity. They worried that ungodliness, wealth and riches would replace the influence of the church and especially where no churches yet existed.

The domination of the Puritans in New England and the Anglicans in the colonial south waned. New denominations that found space in the New World were Baptists and

152 Quakers from England, Dutch Reformed from the Netherlands, German Reformed,

Lutherans, Moravians, Brethren and other Ana-Baptist groups from the principalities of

Germany, Mennonites from Switzerland, Presbyterians from Scotland, Huguenots from

France, Roman Catholics from England and France. By 1775 there were five synagogues for the approximately 1,000 Jews that had come to America.

By 1740 Puritans were less pure as their theology began to emphasize human efforts and responsibilities before God rather than God’s Sovereign authority in matters of faith and holiness. Ministers and congregations became more elitist, formal, intellectual and professional in attitude. However, God’s sovereignty overruled the situation.

A series of revivals broke out during the 1730’s and 1740’s. It was a “Great” awakening because it touched virtually every segment of society. It began with Theodore

Jacob Frelinghuysen (1691-1748), a German born, Dutch Calvinist and educated minister who arrived with the Dutch settlers in the Raritan Valley of New Jersey. He warned his congregation about the dangers of religious formalism and preached their need for conversion. Over the next few years these Dutch Reformed churches experienced growing numbers of members and deepening piety – signs of revival. Gilbert Tennant

(1703-1764) a neighboring minister in New Brunswick was influenced by Frelinghuysen and began preaching about heartfelt faith and he achieved the same results. Gilbert’s brothers, John and William, Jr., joined him in spreading the message. William Tennent

Sr. (1673-1746) was thus fulfilled in seeing the fruit borne by his sons.

153 Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) had grown up under the influence of his grandfather

Solomon Stoddard who had experienced five “harvests” throughout his sixty- year ministry. Edwards experienced a similar revival in the early 1730’s. He was concerned about the “licentiousness” of Northampton’s young people, and troubled about the spread of spiritual self-reliance (i.e. Arminianism). He visited the youths in their homes and preached against the latter in a series of sermons in 1734 on justification by faith alone.

During the winter of 1734 and on into 1735 a concern for godliness spread over

Northampton as many desired to be sure of salvation. Edwards wrote later, “The town seemed to be full of the presence of God. It never was so full of love, nor so full of joy, and yet as full of distress, as it was then. There were remarkable tokens of God’s presence in almost every home.” The revival then faded but it spread throughout the

English speaking world. A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the

Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton is Edwards’ account written in 1737, and it encouraged other ministers to look for revival in their congregations which subsequently happened.

One sermon Edwards wrote and preached in 1741 has become famous and stereotypical of this revival. Below is small part of this sermon that could last up to two hours on a Sunday morning. “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” is actually an eloquent exposition of Deuteronomy 32:25, “Their foot shall slide in due time.”

God has laid himself under no obligation, by any promise, to keep any natural man out of hell one moment…. So that it is that natural men are held in the hand of God over the pit of hell; they have deserved the fiery pit, and are already sentenced to it; and God is dreadfully provoked. His anger is as great towards them as to those that are actually suffering the executions of the fierceness of his wrath in hell, and they have done nothing in the least to appease or abate that anger. Neither is God in the least bound by any promise to hold them up one moment. The devil is waiting for them. Hell is gaping for them…. The use of this awful subject may be for awakening unconverted persons in this

154 congregation. This that you have heard is the case of every one of you that are out of Christ…. You probably are not sensible of this; you find you are kept out of hell, but do not see the hand of God in it. But look at other things, as the good state of your bodily constitution, your care of your own life, and the means you use for your own preservation. But indeed these things are nothing. If God should withdraw his hand they would avail no more to keep you from falling, than the thin air to hold up a person that is suspended in it. Your wickedness makes you as it were heavy as lead, and to tend downwards with great weight and pressure towards hell; and if God should let you go, you would immediately sink and swiftly descend and plunge into the bottomless gulf….and all your righteousness, would have no more influence to uphold you and keep you out of hell, than a spider’s web would have to stop a falling rock…. The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked. His wrath towards you burns like fire. He looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire. He is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight. You are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes, than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours…. Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given a reason why you do not this very moment drop down into hell…. Therefore, let every one that is out of Christ, now awake and fly the wrath to come. The wrath of God Almighty is now undoubtedly hanging over a great part of this congregation. Let every one fly out of Sodom: “Haste and escape for your lives, look not behind you, escape to the mountain, lest you be consumed.” (Jonathan Edwards, The Works of Jonathan Edwards Vol. 2 (Carlisle, Pennsylvania: The Banner of Truth Trust), pp. 9,10,12.)

Edwards was one of the great theological and philosophical minds and has been adjudged so by many scholars. His Treatise on Religious Affections is a classic that shows how the Holy Spirit stirs revival on and in one’s heart and brings salvation. The best way to know that revival meetings are successful or that a true “revival” has taken place is by the significantly changed lives that Christ affects. In 1750 he accepted a call to the Indian mission in Stockbridge, Massachusetts where he wrote, Freedom of the Will and Original Sin among other works. He refuted Enlightenment rationalism, deism, and

Arminianism or any notion that we have a free will apart from the saving grace and freedom of Christ. In the above works and in others Edwards argues that sinful natural man does not really have a “free will” where he can choose how to live. Instead it is the sin nature or the “natural” drives that dictate his private thoughts and his intellectual,

155 social and political ideas and decisions. This person has no way to understand or be free of a world where nothing truly satisfies or lasts until he meets the Savior, Jesus Christ and believes on Him. The person who is redeemed or born again in Christ is the only person who truly has a choice and can make that choice between the Lord’s ways and the world’s ways. The true Christian has “free will” or his will is freed to Love God the way he was designed to or to love the world. Another place to read about this is in the book of

Romans in the Bible.

Edwards became the president of the College of New Jersey (later called Princeton

College) in 1758 but died of a smallpox inoculation shortly thereafter. He was trying to prove to people that the inoculation and hence the findings of scientific research would be safe.

George Whitefield (1714-1771) was with John and Charles Wesley and very influential in the revivals in Great Britain. Whitefield was a great orator, preacher, evangelist and he could have been a theatrical dramatist. He held theologically, unlike

Wesley, to Calvinist and predestinarian theology but emphasized the personal spiritual experience with Christ in response to his revival preaching. This made all the people he preached to able to hear, admire, and be affected by his efforts whether they belonged to an established church or not. He was also famous for using the growing press

(newspapers, magazines, letters) to advertise and spread his fame. He even used the negative publicity and the criticism of the established Church of England and the Bishop to make himself the persecuted and maltreated antihero and an even greater attraction to all of the curious. He was considered a friend to all, civil authorities, the general public, slaves, and prisoners, including many historical personages such as Benjamin Franklin.

156 Hence, by the time he traveled to America he was already well known through his publications and all of the publicity.

In 1739, at the age of 25, he made a preaching tour of America that evoked a tremendous revival that affected the populations of all the colonies. He became the image and center of what became known as “The Great Awakening.” To historians in our time this was called the First Great Awakening.

Ben Franklin gives this account of Whitefield who stayed in Franklin’s house when he visited Philadelphia. He wrote:

In 1739 arrived among us from England the Rev. Mr. Whitefield, who had made himself remarkable there as an itinerant preacher. He was at first permitted to preach in some of our churches; but the clergy, taking a dislike to him, soon refused him their pulpits, and he was obliged to preach in the fields. The multitudes of all sects and denominations that attended his sermons was enormous, and it was matter of speculation to me, who was one of the number, to observe the extraordinary influence of his oratory on his hearers and how much they admired and respected him, notwithstanding his common abuse of them, by assuring them they were naturally “half beasts and half devils.” It was wonderful to see the change soon made in the manners of our inhabitants; from being thoughtless or indifferent about religion, it seemed as if all the world were growing religious, so that one could not walk through the town in an evening without hearing psalms sung in different families of every street. Mr. Whitefield, in leaving us, went preaching all the way through the colonies to Georgia...(where there were) many helpless children unprovided for. The sight of their miserable situation inspired the benevolent hearing of Mr. Whitefield with the idea of building an orphan house there….Returning northward he preached up this charity and made large collections; for his eloquence had a wonderful power over the hearts and purses of his hearers, of which I myself was an instance….I happened soon after to attend one of his sermons, in the cause of which I perceived he intended to finish with a collection, and I silently resolved he should get nothing from me. I had in my pocket a handful of copper money, 3 or 4 silver dollars, and 5 pistoles in gold. As he proceeded, I began to soften and concluded to give the coppers. Another stroke of his oratory made me ashamed of that and determined me to give the silver; and he finished so admirably that I emptied my pocket wholly into the collector’s dish, gold and all. At this sermon there was also one of our club, who being of my sentiments respecting the building in Georgia and suspecting a collection might be intended, had by precaution emptied his pockets before he came home; toward the conclusion of this discourse, however, he felt a strong desire to give and applied to this neighbor who stood near him to borrow some money for the purpose. The application was unfortunately made to perhaps the only man in the company who had the firmness not to be affected by the preacher. His answer was,

157 “At any other time Friend Hopkinson, I would lend to thee freely, but not now; for thee seems to be out of thy right senses.” Some of Mr. Whitefield’s enemies affected to suppose that he would apply these collections to his own emolument, but I who was intimately acquainted with him (being employed in printing his sermons and journals, etc) never had the least suspicion of his integrity, but am to this day decidedly of the opinion that he was in all his conduct a perfectly honest man. And methinks my testimony in his favor ought to have the more weight as we had no religious connections. He used, indeed, sometimes to pray for my conversion but never had the satisfaction of believing that his prayers were heard. Ours was a mere civil friendship, sincere on both sides, and lasted to the death. The following instance will show something of the terms on which we stood. Upon one his arrivals from England to Boston, he wrote to me that he should come soon to Philadelphia, but knew not where he could lodge when there, as he understood his old, kind host, Mr. Benezet, was removed to Germantown. May answer was “You know my house; if you can make shift with its scanty accommodations, you will be most heartily welcome.” He replied that if I made that kind of offer for Christ’s sake, I should not miss of a reward. And I returned, “Don’t let me be mistaken; it was not for Christ’s sake but for your sake.” He had a loud and clear voice and articulated his words and sentences so perfectly that he might be heard and understood at a great distance, especially as his auditories, however, numerous, observed the most exact silence. He preached one evening from the top of the court house steps, which are in the middle of Market Street and on the west side of Second Street, which crosses it at right angles. Both streets were filled with his hearers to a considerable distance. Being among the hindmost in Market Street, I had the curious to learn how far he could be heard by retiring backwards down the street toward the river, and I found his voice distinct till I came near Front street, when some noise in that street obscured it. Imagining then a semicircle, of which my distance should be the radius, and that it were filled with auditors, to each of whom I allowed two square feet, I computed that he might well be heard by more than 30,000. This reconciled me to the newspaper accounts of his having preached to 25,000 people in the fields, and to the ancient histories of generals haranguing whole armies of which I had sometimes doubted. By hearing him often I came to distinguish easily between sermons newly composed and those which he had often preached in the course of his travels. His delivery of the latter was so improved by frequent repetitions that every accent, every emphasis, every modulation of voice was so perfectly well turned and well placed that, without being interested in the subject, one could not help being pleased with the discourse, a pleasure of much the same kind with that received from an excellent piece of music. This is an advantage itinerant preachers have over those who are stationary, as the latter cannot well improve their delivery of a sermon by so many rehearsals.

Whitefield preached more than 15,000 sermons in his 30 years career. He saw the Great

Awakening spread from England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland to every North American colony. He died, or flamed out for God, on October 15, 1770 in Newport, Rhode Island.

158 One of the most fitting elegies composed at his death and which had the greatest circulation was the one composed by a seventeen year old black servant girl named

Phyllis Wheatley. She wrote:

Hail happy saint on thy immortal throne! To thee complaints of grievance are unknown. We hear no more the music of thy tongue, Thy wanted auditories cease to throng. Thy lessons in unequaled accents flow’d! While emulation in each bosom glow’d Thou dids’t, in strains of eloquence refined Inflame the soul, and captivate the mind. Unhappy we, the setting Sun deplore; Which once was splendid, but it shines no more; He leaves this earth of Heaven’s unmeasured height: And worlds unknown, receive him from our sight; There Whitefield wings, with rapid course his way, And sails to Zion, through vast seas of day. Phillis Wheatley

Whitefield’s work and his message made a great impact on the African-American populace who were forced to come to North America with the institution of slavery. It was from this time that the African American populace would become increasing

Christianized. Phillis Wheatley represented the slave population that was equally impacted by the Great Awakening. Wheatley also represented the African influence in

American culture. Her abilities and poetic influence touched the lives of early

Americans and thus she rose above her status as a slave and servant.

QUESTIONS: 1. What was the First Great Awakening all about? 2. Who were the major figures involved and what did they do?

FURTHER READING:

Nathan O. Hatch and Harry S Stout, eds. Jonathan Edwards and the American

Experience. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

159 Perry Miller. Jonathan Edwards. New York: Meridian, 1959.

Harry S. Stout. The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern

Evangelicalism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991.

THE REVOLUTIONARY AGE

FURTHER READING: Charles Breunig, The Age of Revolution and Reaction: 1789-1850 (1970) Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (1957) Peter Gay, ed. Deism: An Anthology (1968) John McManners, The French Revolution and the Church (1970) Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto in the Communist Party (1968) David B. Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1975) J. Kuczynski, The Rise of the Working Class (1971) Edmund S. Morgan, The Puritan Dilemma (1958) John Newton, Out of the Depths: An Autobiography John Wesley, Journal (1 volume abridged) C. Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger, Ireland, 1845-1849 (1964)

QUESTIONS: 1) What has been the role of biblical principles in the legal and political history of the countries you are studying? 2) Is it true that lands influenced by the Reformation escaped political violence because biblical concepts were acted upon? 3) What are the core distinctions, in terms of ideology and results, between English and American Revolutions on the one hand, and the French and the Russian on the other hand? 4) What were the weaknesses that developed at a later date in countries which had a Reformation base? 5) Dr. Francis Schaeffer believed that basic to action is an idea, and that the history of the West in the last two or three centuries has been marked by a humanism pressed to its tragic conclusions and by a Christianity insufficiently applied to the totality of life. How should Christians then approach participation and political affairs?

KEY EVENTS AND PERSONS Calvin 1509-1564 Samuel Rutherford 1600-1661; Rutherford’s Lex Rex 1644 John Locke 1631-1704 John Wesley 1703-1791 Voltaire 1694-1791; Letters on the English Nation 1733

160 George Whitefield 1714-1770 John Witherspoon 1723-1794 John Newton 1725-1807 John Howard 1726-1790 Thomas Jefferson 1743-1826 Robespierre 1758-1794 William Wilberforce 1759-1833 Thomas Clarkson 1760-1846 Napoleon 1769-1821 Elizabeth Fry 1780-1845 Declaration of Rights of Man 1789 National Constituent Assembly 1789-91 Second French Revolution and Revolutionary Calendar 1792 The Reign of Terror 1792-1794 Lord Schaftsbury 1801-1855 English slave trade ended 1807 Slavery ended in Great Britain and the Empire 1833 Slavery ended in the United States 1865 Karl Marx 1818-1883 Lenin 1870-1924 Trotsky 1879-1940 Stalin 1879-1953 February and October Russian Revolutions 1917 Czechoslovakian repression 1968

161 GREAT BRITAIN AND THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 1763-1815 J. Franklin Sexton and Gary K. Pranger

THE ROAD TO INDEPENDENCE From the British point of view, the American Revolution was a war that the North

American Colonies fought for national independence. From the American viewpoint the

Revolution was a civil war against imperialism. Thus, revolutionary activity took place during a twenty- year period from 1763 to 1783.

At the end of the Seven Years War in Europe and what was known as The French and Indian War in Northeast America and Canada (1756-1763), a peace conference took place in Paris in 1763. The treaty known as the Peace of Paris removed for the English colonial settlers the danger of French encirclement and at the same time enhanced their political self-esteem and so American Colonial settlers desired more freedom. This was, however, in violation of the British imperial policies according to the “King’s friends,” a group in Parliament dependent for their power and prestige on King George III (1760-

1820).

Tensions between the mother country and the colonies increased because of

1) a prohibition of settlement west of the Appalachians Mountains. This created the

Proclamation line of 1763 where pro-Indian policies went against pro-colonial desires.

2) The Mercantilist economic policies of Great Britain were pressed on the colonies in a strict manner that put limitations on colonial trade. 3) London levied direct taxes to help pay for the British war debts. 4) Local colonial legislatures began to chafe at the policies and decisions handed down by the Crown authorities, especially in New England. 5)

Socially, the American colonials began to feel and think like different people from their kin across the Atlantic as the ocean put significant time and distance between them, and

162 thus alienation was created. 6) Religiously, Anglican ministers did not seem to meet local needs. Colonials desired to protect freedom of religion and keep away from a

Church of England or a “national church” which would proscribe and prescribe Christian worship, theology and practice. This was a very revolutionary concept because to this point in history all Christian nations had a “national” church, and all earthly kingdoms at any time in history had a chosen religion that could not be questioned or changed.

7) Increasingly the Crown authorities restricted civil liberties. There was an increased repression due to admiralty courts where there were no juries but only British officers presiding as the Crown attempted to put a stop to perceived and real revolutionary agitators and conspirators.

George Grenville became the Exchequer (Head of the British State Department in charge of revenue). He responded to colonial problems by ending the policy or lack of a policy called “salutary neglect.” From the founding of the colonies in the early 1600’s to

1763 there had been a general period of relative neglect of the North American colonies.

These colonies began to manufacture and trade on their own and break away from the

Mercantilist nationalist policies of “Greater” Britain. After 1763 Grenville and English mercantilists in Parliament wanted the colonies to abide by the original Navigation Acts that had said the colonies could only trade in British ships and with British ports. The colonies were to supply only raw materials to Britain where the mother country would then make the manufactured goods to sell to the British world order. The mercantilist policies and profits were meant to benefit the mother country only and keep the colonies dependent on her.

163 Thus, Grenville implemented a number of new acts. The American Sugar Act (or

Revenue Act, 1763) was a tax on sugar manufactured and sold in the North American

Colonies. The Currency Act of 1764 made it illegal to print your own money or use the currency of other nations in daily transactions. This was an attempt to bring uniformity in money used in the Colonies and end the bewildering number of monies used.

The First Quartering Act allowed soldiers to be housed in public places in towns and

Inns. The Stamp Act in 1765 put a tax on all documents, mail, parcels, books and papers.

In reaction to Grenville’s policies, American opposition crystallized against imperial reorganization in the formation of political theories that were distinctly American. Back in London, Edmund Burke and William Pitt, the elder, stood up for the interests of the colonists, but they were only partially successful. American leaders came to the fore and created the Stamp Act Congress which lobbied and forced the repeal of the Stamp Act in

1766. However, in its place Charles Townshend introduced new import duties in the

Townshend Acts of 1766. By raising taxes in the colonies Townshend was able to lower the taxes in England. This was a politically shrewd and popular policy in England but of course the colonies protested and resisted these new acts. Townshend struck back by implementing the Writs of Assistance or general warrants in order to arrest or search anyone of concern by the British officials.

After 1770 all of this led to unrest in Boston and a boycott of British goods. Radicals like Samuel Adams (1722-1803) and Thomas Jefferson established “correspondence societies”(or Committees of Correspondence) to organize separation movements.

Thomas Paine in his pamphlet Common Sense (1776) added increasing momentum to the

164 cause. Demands for representation in Parliament (“No taxation without representation.”) were not met. However, many special taxes were eliminated.

One tax remained and this was the Tea Duty that safeguarded the East India

Company’s monopoly on tea. In order to balance its supply and demand problems the

East India Company dumped tea on the colonies and then put a tax on this tea in order to make money. In 1773 the colonials dressed up like Indians and held the Boston Tea

Party. The cargoes from three ships were thrown into Boston Harbor. The government closed the harbor and declared martial law. More British laws called the Coercive Acts

(or Intolerable Acts) of 1774 caused more resistance and the British did three things. 1)

The Boston Port Bill controlled the harbor and who could load and unload there. 2) The

Administration of Justice Act allowed only British Crown judges in trials. 3) The

Massachusetts Governing Act ended the right of home rule. 4) A new Quartering Act authorized troops to be quartered in the homes of Colonists. The cost going to the homeowner.

In 1774 the First Continental Congress came together at Philadelphia. Delegates of the 13 Colonies (Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New

Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South

Carolina, and Georgia) decided to suspend trade with Britain until the pre-1763 legal status quo was restored.

The first armed clash between American militia and British troops came on April 18,

1775 at Lexington. This developed into the American War of Independence 1775 to

1783. The population of the thirteen colonies combined was three million and the colonists lacked trained troops, money, and war materials or consistent leadership.

165 George Washington (1772-1799), a Virginia planter from his estate called Mt. Vernon, was made Commander in Chief by the 2nd Continental Congress. His opponents were, first, the British colonial army and among them 17,000 partly reliable mercenaries from

Hesse and Brunswick in Germany who had been sold by their princes for service by the

British. Second, the “loyalists,” Americans who remained faithful to England; and third,

Indian tribes allied with England became opponents to American independence.

Despite the growing conflict, there were delays in the signing of the Declaration of

Independence because of sentimental attachments to Britain and the fear of anarchy in the face of a power vacuum. It must be remembered that nothing like the American nation had existed as yet and nobody knew that it would work. Plus, those who pledged independence knew they could and in many cases did end up sacrificing their lives, families, property, and wealth for the cause. Moreover, it was feared that business interests in the British Empire would be jeopardized now and in the future. Also, a pacifist movement in England lobbied before and within Parliament to stop the fighting in the colonies.

However, the fighting brought early successes and there was so much resentment toward the British army and the Hessians that Church and Press continued to support separation and supported Congress.

The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776 by the 13 United States and symbolized by the 13 stripes of the American flag. This was the first formulation of human rights (life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness) into a political system. These human rights became the guiding forces for the United States, and of the right to political opposition derived from them. The document attesting to the birth of the new nation and

166 present world power was the work of Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826). The Fourth of July became the birthday and the national holiday for the United States of America.

In 1776 the British were defeated along the Delaware River at Trenton and Princeton in New Jersey. Logistics problems and the unorthodox guerilla tactics of the settlers made the struggle more difficult for the British. In 1777 the Americans won a strategic victory at Saratoga, New York.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) represented the American cause in Paris as the first

United States ambassador. French aristocratic volunteers fought under Washington, among them the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Political hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko and the Prussian general and organizer of the American army Baron von Steuben. “The mid- wives of the American Republic” were the absolutist powers France and Spain. The latter entered the war against England from 1779 to1782. France and Spain unsuccessfully besieged Gibraltar, the strategic island off of Spain that protects free shipping from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean Sea. The British had held this island since the time of War of Spanish Succession in the 1600’s. But Spain did take back

Minorca in the Mediterranean from the British. The British won naval victories in the

West Indies with Admiral Rodney and in particular at St. Vincent. To combat British naval raiding in 1780 Russia, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, and Prussia established “armed neutrality at sea.” The principle of the neutral flag from that time protects enemy goods with the exception of war materials and this became part of modern international maritime law. Under the Rochambeau’s command, French troops landed in Rhode Island to fight off the British and protect it for the United States.

167 In 1781 after the siege of Yorktown by the Americans on land and the French navy at sea the British and Lord Cornwallis surrendered.

Under the 1783 Peace of Paris treaty Britain recognized American independence.

Tobago in the West Indies and Senegambia in Africa went to France. Spain received

Minorca and Florida.

Significantly for Britain this was the most important defeat since the Reformation era and it brought severe damage to the British transatlantic empire. For France, additional war debts burdened the already run-down public finances. However, French volunteers returned home and were acclaimed as freedom fighters and the criticism of the Ancien

Regime increased.

For North America, independence was attained after great sacrifices and 70,000 war dead. Loyalists emigrated to Canada. Constitutional problems remained unresolved as the loose state’s rights confederation threatened to fall apart. This brought on a need for a constitution with a stronger federal government. There was an end to the Anglican

Church in the United States and so no national church governed the whole. Reforms were begun that included penal or prison reform. The Auburn method of prison governance was developed that kept prisoners in individual and separate cells.

Moreover, a broader basis for independent political life was established. More significantly for revolutionary and constitutionally minded Europeans the principles of the Enlightenment were upheld and embodied in the American nation. Enlightenment ideals: reason, order, clarity, progress, natural law were all a part of the Declaration of

Independence and the new Constitution after 1783. To British and American thinkers in the long view of all the revolutions from 1776 to 1917, the American Revolution was

168 considered to be an evolutionary outgrowth of the English Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the British Constitution. The American Revolution did not destroy the institutions of government, church and society, but reinterpreted them and reestablished them. The

American Republic had two ideological foundations: 1) the English Enlightenment which argued for true representation and law and 2) Reformation Protestant Christianity which argued for freedom of religion, church polity and worship and that governments should not be in the business of interfering in these rights.

Thus to the Enlightenment thinkers of Europe the United States became a living example of government established by social contract.

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Following Virginia’s example, the individual states replaced their colonial statutes with state constitutions. These guaranteed “Popular Sovereignty” by means of basic democratic rights as in the 1776 Virginia Bill of Rights put together by Thomas

Jefferson. Secondly, these state constitutions guaranteed the separation of powers and the elective principle for all offices of state. Thirdly, they guaranteed the separation of church and state. The precedent for this was the 1785 Virginia Statute of Religious

Liberty also penned by Thomas Jefferson.

Inflation, many other economic problems and border conflicts with the Indians forced the states to cooperate with a plan for central government.

In 1787 the Constitutional Convention was held in Philadelphia. Here Benjamin

Franklin and James Madison mediated between the “Federalists,” who advocated a strong central government (Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and George Washington) and the

Republicans (later called Democrats – Thomas Jefferson), who stressed the rights of

169 individual states. The 55 delegates of the 13 original states compromised by establishing a federal republic under a president. The written constitution was ratified by all the individual states only reluctantly, but it became law in 1789. From this time the veneration of the “founding fathers” in the United States corresponded to the idea of “the legitimate ruling house” in Europe.

When the Constitutional Convention issued the constitution on September 17, 1787, the United States became the first modern democracy. The essential characteristics were laid in the foundation of the Separation of Powers advocated by the British Constitution and Montesquieu and in a system of checks and balances. Thus, between the Federal government and the states (in effect creating double citizenship), the Federal government was responsible for defense, currency, foreign policy, overseas trade; and the individual states were responsible for roads, education, law enforcement, and police. Thus the checks and balances created a protective tension between the individual states and the

Union.

The separation of powers was created in three distinct entities. The “President” became the head of state and chief administrator. He was later nominated by the parties and indirectly elected for a four- year term. Re-election was possible once - with the exception being Franklin D. Roosevelt 1932-1945. The President appoints the secretaries of state (called ministers in the old- world) and may be removed from office before the expiration of his term only through successfully completed impeachment procedures.

Politically, however, the President is subject to control by Congress and constitutionally by the Supreme Court.

170 Congress consists of two chambers that may not be dissolved. The House of

Representatives had members that were elected directly for two- year terms. These

Representatives represented the interests of their political districts created by the individual states by population. The Senate had “Senators,” one third of them elected for six years terms every two years to represent the individual states. The President holds a suspensive veto power over Congress, and the Supreme Court watches over the legislative process.

The Supreme Court originally consisted of nine individual members appointed by the

President for life terms. They exercise judicial review of constitutional and legislative problems. The Constitution has been amended only 26 times since 1789.

THE PERIOD OF THE VIRGINIA PRESIDENTS

George Washington was the first President of the United States from 1789 to 1797.

Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804) proposed a national program to develop industry, commerce and finances. This stabilized the newly created state and laid the foundation for the power of American capitalism. Washington had also to “create” the tradition as well as the institution of “the president” by resisting all entreaties to be crowned or called a king in any manor. His humility and Enlightened and Christian understanding of people helped to carve out the job requirements for the president which included the need to preserve and defend the country on all occasions. Though the original capital of the nation was New York, the capital city of Washington became in 1800 the seat of the presidents and the White House, his residence. The Congress met in the “Capitol.”

171 From 1797 to 1801, John Adams, a Federalist, became President. He had the first difficulties with the South and specifically in Kentucky owing to the Alien and Sedition

Acts that had been implemented.

From 1801 to 1809 Thomas Jefferson, a Republican, became President. Under him there was a reaction against the centralist policies of the Federal government. This was expressed in the maxim, “a minimum of government and governing.” Ironically,

Jefferson an opponent to the Federal system and an advocate of state’s rights in the

Constitutional debates helped to expand and solidify Federal power.

This was especially so as the energies and interests of the nation were directed to the

“Winning of the West.” Westward expansion came through settlement by Americans and immigration from Western, Central and Northern Europe. The population increased from

3.9 million in 1790 to 7.2 million in 1810. Settlers pushed across the Appalachians into the interior. Settlers and land settlement companies received grants of land against payment of the legally fixed minimum price – approximately $1.00 an acre. Though theoretically equal in the eyes of the law, the Indians were persecuted and made to move by General Anthony Wayne and General Andrew Jackson. They reacted with cruel raids that resulted in on and off again settler and government battles with the Indians until the late 1800’s. The Indian tribes who refused to disperse and become modern citizens became an obstacle to settlers and land companies. Eventually the United States would create land settlements that were highly unfavorable to the Indians and the tribes would be forced to reside in reservations and in the Oklahoma Indian Territory.

After 1787, the creation of the Northwest Ordinance and settlement of the Northwest and Mississippi territories led to the establishment of the following states: Kentucky

172 (1792), Tennessee (1796), Ohio (1803), Louisiana (1812), Indiana (1816), Mississippi

(1817), Illinois (1818) and Alabama (1819).

Along with the settlement process, missionary organizations such as the American

Home Missionary Society were formed to evangelize and plant churches in the new communities. The AHMS planted Presbyterian, Congregational and Reformed Churches across the nation in an effort to keep Puritan Christianity and the revival fires of the First and Second Great Awakenings alive and burning. They acted separately but often worked in concert with the Methodists and Baptists to establish Christianity in every community.

American civil religion was produced from the mixture of Protestant Christianity,

Enlightenment thought from Scotland, England, and France, and the peculiar and distinct

American forms and beliefs in patriotism, a free society, politics, and economics. The revolutionary war generation aged and public buildings were built in every state capital and in Washington through the early 1800’s. State and national monuments, engravings, paintings, murals, inscriptions and memorabilia reflected these values. Furthermore,

Christian and secular newspapers and publications helped to create this unique synthesis.

In foreign policy, the new United States preferred isolationism from the rest of the world, except in the area of trade. In 1793 the Unites States declared its neutrality toward all the events taking place in Europe, despite its alliance with France in 1778 and in the first War of the Coalition during the French Revolution in 1789. In his farewell address in 1796 President Washington warned against getting involved in any way that would lead to “lasting entanglements” with Europe.

173 In 1803, Napoleon sold the Louisiana territory to the United States for $15 million.

The “Louisiana Purchase” became the “greatest real-estate deal in the history of the

United States,” as it doubled the size of the nation and in effect opened the entire Western part of the future continental United States to settlement. This deal also facilitated the opening of the continent by means of the new unobstructed Mississippi River traffic. The entire Mississippi River system with its attendant rivers and drainage became usable for travel and commerce.

The Embargo Act of 1807 was the response of the United States to tensions with

Great Britain over Indian problems, territorial claims, and commercial competition.

From 1809 to 1817, President James Madison, a Republican, allowed himself to be drawn into war with Britain in order to obtain Canada which resulted in the “War of 1812.”

This war which lasted from 1812 to 1814 was called “the Second War of Independence.”

Madison was unable to prevent British coastal raiding and the destruction of Washington.

General Andrew Jackson, known as Old Hickory, won a great victory at New Orleans.

In 1814 the United States and England agreed to the Treaty of Ghent. Great Britain was satisfied with the restoration of the status quo as before 1812 because of the situation in Europe with Napoleon that absorbed all their attention. The Great Lakes were neutralized and taken out of all conflict.

Thus by 1815 the United States was established, growing and fostering with continued emigration from Great Britain and Northern Europe. However, from the very first president the inequities and contradictions in the American system were a cause for concern. Washington and Jefferson both lamented that slavery existed in the land of

174 freedom and predicted that this problem among many others would have to be solved in time.

QUESTIONS: 1. How did American Independence come about and what did this mean? 2. How and in what ways did other European nations and individuals take part and help in the American Revolution? 3. How did the new nation organize politically, socially, economically? 4. How did Christianity and Enlightenment influence the founding of the United States? 5. What part did the American

Revolutionary movement have on France and the rest of Europe?

FURTHER READING:

Bernard Bailyn. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge,

Mass: Harvard University Press, 1967.

David W. Bebbington. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730’s to the 1980’s. London: Unwin Human, 1989.

David Bryon Davis. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823.

Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1975.

Mark A Noll. Christians in the American Revolution. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,

1977.

175 THE COMING OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

J. Franklin Sexton

The French Revolution is considered to be the defining event of “Modern Times.”

Questions about how it began and why have been pursued by scholars for two centuries now. However, the accumulated evidence can help us list the events that led up to the

French Revolution. We can also contrast the nature of the English and the French

Revolution. Additionally, we can explain to what extent ideas caused this Revolution.

Basically, the decay of the Ancien Regime resulted from the decadence of the absolutist systems handed down from one kingly generation to the next. Thus, when

Louis XIV died in 1715, the Crown lost authority and prestige because of the incompetence of Louis XIV’s heir, Louis XV, and because of costly failures in foreign policy after 1714 that undermined the French position of power.

The administration or the officialdom made up of the intendants became over centralized and indifferent. Weakened considerably through Louis XIV’s years, the local powers in the provincial estates, the regional parlements, and the ecclesiastical and aristocratic privileged classes still remained in existence and were dependent on the absolutist central government. The crown conflicted with the Paris parlement, which claimed the right to approve royal decisions. These regional parlements which included the one at Paris had no centralizing authority as did the Parliament in London where it in effect ran the English government under the king. The role of the French “Parlement” functioned more as a judicial review body, and not as a legislative house as did the

Parliament in London.

176 In terms of the social and economic life, the outdated feudal order caused dissatisfaction and social tensions in all estates. The social structure was made up of

Estates. The First Estate was made up of the “clergy” or about 100,000 out of a total

French population of 24 million but the Catholic clergy owned 10% of the land. Great differences in the standards of living existed among the clergy. Cardinals, archbishops, and bishops could be very wealthy while parish priests or itinerant priests or those in certain monastic orders could be very poor. The Clergy were exempt from paying taxes but they were to give a “gift” occasionally.

The Second Estate was made up of the nobility, some 400,000, and some of these were now intendants or agents of the crown during the reigns of Louis XV and Louis

XVI. It had not been intended to be this way when Louis XIV was trying to control the noble class with neutral civil servants employed from the educated Third Estate. The nobility had most of the income and paid no taxes. Now after 1715 they had claims to the officers’ commissions in the army and the upper echelon of administrative positions.

The Nobility consisted of the upper nobility who depended for their income on royal offices, pensions and rents from land-holdings. Next in line were the country nobility in the provinces.

The nobility of the sword as they were called during the middle ages were the protectors, the knights, the warriors that protected their peasant farmers and villages and were paid by peasant goods and services. Over time these nobles of the sword abandoned the castle and simply became by tradition and ownership the leaders over their communities and the landowners who dominated life from their provincial estates. The country nobility still lived in the Chateaux and held to the medieval manor house system

177 where the peasants’ homes and lives revolved around the Noble’s grand house. Here the noble had hunting rights over the whole property that included the peasants’ farmland, gardens and orchards. If these were in the way during the hunt it was just too bad. These nobles held service monopolies in that the local noble owned the mill, bakery, winepress, and shops. The peasant could buy things or use these services for a fee. The noble also held judicial rights, police powers and could levy fines and fees. The peasant could sell his land but had to pay a fee and make payments to the noble owner of the chateaux that made him a tenant farmer. In other words, it was very difficult to become independent of the noble landowner. Peasants actually owned 40% of the land; nobles 23%, the middle class 18%, and the Church 10%. The rest were “Crown Lands” or wastelands or mountains.

In contrast to the nobility of the sword, the “nobility of the robe” were those bourgeois or middle class officials who had purchased titles of nobility.

The Third Estate included all other Frenchmen – almost 24 million in population.

This group included middle class industrialists, merchants, lawyers, physicians, craftsmen, artists, urban artisans, working class, poor and unemployed and all “peasants,” or countryside people and agricultural workers. The wealthy or successful middle class people were favored by the mercantilist system. The prevailing guild organization of the crafts was dissolved in the metropolis of Paris.

Paris in the late 1700’s had approximately 650,000 people. Through the course of the 1700’s as the army in particular needed mass-produced goods this led to the establishment of factories and the beginnings of an industrial proletariat. As factories for

178 all enterprises were established in the cities, the cities, and especially, Paris, grew as they drew more peasants off the land to become industrial wage hands.

The Peasantry was no longer in a condition of serfdom. However, they were still socially and legally disadvantaged. Even though they were suffering under the pressures of a “feudal reaction,” an extension of noble titles to land with the aid of the local parlements, landowning peasants could get along. The hereditary tenant farmers and leaseholders also remained relatively independent despite considerable obligation on their part in payments, taxes, and fees. The increasing class of agricultural laborers who owned no property made up more than 50% of the population and it was this segment of the population that brought on a crisis.

The French government’s fiscal policy was scandalous. Constant deficits bordering on state bankruptcies were due to extravagant spending. To cover it, loans were taken up at high rates of interest. The administration was inflexible concerning taxation, especially on excise taxes such as on salt, called the gabelle or salt tax, which was administered by tax farmers who profited in the process. The nobility defended its exemption from the property tax and the clergy contributed only voluntary payments.

Thus the burden of the taxation fell on the poorest classes. Up to 70% of the income of the peasants was taken by taxation. Rising prices further diminished real income.

THE ROLE OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT

The Enlightenment prepared the opposition forces to the government. Diderot,

Voltaire, and all who wrote for the Encyclopedia radically criticized the prevailing conditions. Aristocrats, bourgeoisie, and many others read Enlightenment ideas in books, articles, newspapers, and pamphlets. They discussed revolutionary ideas in the salons

179 and coffeehouses. Those who could not read had these things read to them in the taverns and street corners.

The ideas of Montesquieu (1689-1775) in the Spirit of the Laws (1748) about the separation of powers and natural law gave people many ideas about democracy even though he advocated a constitutional monarchy. Voltaire (1694-1778) thought there should be liberty for the enlightened. He believed only an intellectual elite in the fashion of Plato’s ideas of philosopher kings should be allowed to rule. Voltaire called for an enlightened, efficient government and a reduction in sloth, stupidity and religious dogmatism. Instead there should be freedom of thought and religion. Rousseau (1712-

1778) in the Social Contract pushed for radical democracy and even socialism. In this he advocated the ending of private property and artificial institutions that caused people, in his opinion, to lie, cheat, kill and steal.

These and many other ideas contributed to the coming of the French Revolution in the following ways. 1) These ideas weakened traditional religion. In the Enlightened thinkers eyes the Roman Catholic Church had been allied with the monarchy and it had sought out the advantages of earth without delay instead of living and teaching the Bible.

Many Enlightenment thinkers did not understand Christianity anyway and thought all religion was illogical and unreasonable. 2) The Enlightenment taught that one could create “secular” ethics that are not derived from religion. This reasonable code of ethics is based on the “love of humanity.” Thus humanism is implemented through “altruism,” the desire to do be good and moral in order to help, perpetuate, and improve mankind.

3) The Enlightenment developed the critical spirit of analysis in all areas of study that was applied more and more to social, political and economic inequalities. 4) The study

180 of history was used to refute divine rights, noble privileges and anything that appeared illogical, stupid, or cunning. Enlightenment thinkers and believers were out to debunk all of past history and especially the Middle Ages where Feudalism and the Church seemed to come from. They liked and enhanced the study of classical Greece and Rome. They searched for secular models to form new ideas and values.

Slogans of liberty and equality influenced public opinion, which was represented by

1) the privileged upper classes as they insisted on retaining their feudal privileges. At the same time these classes wanted a limitation of the absolute monarchy and the elimination of the judicial functions of the cabinet. In other words, these upper classes wanted everything their own way and this ensured their destruction. 2) The bourgeoisie, as the 3rd

Estate, demanded social equality and political representation.

Louis XVI (1774-1792) was an honest but insignificant man. He decided to begin some reforms. He appointed the physiocrat, Anne-Robert Turgot (1727-81) to be his finance minister. Physiocrats believed in laissez-faire economics but also and at the same time planned authority by an enlightened government. Also, Physiocrats believed that true wealth was derived from the land and not from industry. After his appointment,

Turgot removed the restrictions on the grain trade. This made the plight of the farmer and farming peasant much better as they could set their own prices. However, the workers of Paris rose in protest against the sudden rise in the price of bread. Turgot also tried to implement the king’s reforms. They called for the abolition of feudal rights and guild restrictions, development of local self-administration, and the introduction of a general property tax. All these reform proposals were defeated by the court party of

181 Queen Marie Antoinette (who was sarcastically called, “Madame Deficit) and the aristocratic parlements throughout the provinces of France.

In 1778 the French helped subsidize the United States in its revolutionary fight with

Great Britain and the French then became involved militarily. At this time Jacques

Necker (1732-1804), a Calvinistic banker of Geneva, became finance minister after

Turgot. He attempted in vain to cover the war debts by means of loans. He lost his office because he dared to publicize the miserable state of public finances in the Compte rendu in 1781. In 1783 France celebrated as Great Britain recognized the new United

States at the Peace of Paris. Their part in the war made Senegambia and Tobago new colonies. However, the success of the American independence movement reinforced criticism of the regime by the French people. Salons, cafes, clubs, Masonic lodges all became centers of a “patriotic party” of liberal nobles, clergy, and bourgeois. Principle leaders were Lafayette, Mirabeau, Philip d’Orleans, Talleyrand and many more.

As 80% of France was still agricultural, problems arose and contributed to financial woes and economic depression. Much of the harvest had to be saved for seed and was not available for food even though the population was increasing. The seed quality was not very good and the yields were low per unit of land. The medieval mind-set or custom of letting part of the land lie fallow was a problem. One third of one half of the land was not cultivated from year to year. High consumption of food by workers on the farm meant that more food did not reach the cities. It was calculated that a worker had to eat at least three pounds of bread per day.

From 1783-87, the finance minister was Charles Alexandre de Calonne (1734-1802).

182 He took Turgot’s plans up again which meant he tried to get nobles and aristocrats to pay taxes. However, an assembly of notables (persons enjoying the royal confidence), met for the first time since 1626 and they were unwilling to approve proposals to cover the deficit without receiving information about financial policies. Calonne’s successor

Lomenie De Brienne (1727-94) failed because of opposition by the Paris parlement, which pushed through the convocation of the Estates General to bring on tax reforms.

This body had previously met in 1614.

After a commercial treaty with Britain in 1786, the domestic situation was aggravated by industrial crises caused by the effects of British competition. Moreover, unrest and famines resulted from poor harvests.

Public bankruptcy was declared in 1788 and Necker was recalled as finance minister.

He made it possible for the doubling of the representatives of the 3rd Estate in the Estates

General after an intensely fought election. The members of the Estates General then studied the cahiers. These were desires, grievances and complaints by country and city people that were written down in letters and reports and cataloged by intendants from all over France and brought before the Estates General. Country people discussed agricultural problems and were very anti-tax in a stance against the government and its tax collectors. They did not have a problem with the king in the government. City people discussed the bitterness between the upper nobility and the middle class. Also the pamphlet What is the Third Estate? by Abbe Emanuel Joseph Sieyes (1748-1836) demanded the participation of the representatives of the nation in the government.

Thus the stage was set for the French Revolution.

183 QUESTIONS: 1. What were all the factors that led to the French Revolution? 2.

Who were the main people who brought on the Revolution and what were their ideas? 3. How did political, social and economic conditions bring this time on?

What solutions could have prevented this revolution from happening?

FURTHER READING:

Owen Chadwick. The Popes and European Revolution. Oxford, England: Clarendon,

1981.

Emmet Kennedy. A Cultural History of the French Revolution. New Haven, Conn.:

Yale University Press, 1989.

John McManners. French Ecclesiastical Society under the Ancient Regime: A Study of Angers in the Eighteenth Century. Manchester, England: Manchester University,

1968.

184 THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

J. Franklin Sexton and Gary K. Pranger

The Estates General which met in 1689 was made up of the three orders of France.

The Clergy had 300 votes, the Nobility had 300 votes, and the Third Estate had 600 votes. Voting by house meant a 2 to 1 advantage. Voting by head meant it was an even situation.

NATIONAL ASSEMBLY 1789-1791: On May 5, 1789 the Convocation of the

Estates General was held at Versailles. The 3rd Estate demanded voting by head instead of by estate. The revolution began when the Estates General divided over this issue and others and a portion of this body, the Third Estate, and some nobles and clergy announced the establishment of the National Assembly on June 17, 1789. They took the

“Tennis Court oath” on one of the tennis courts at Versailles. They pledged “not to separate until a constitution had been devised,” said Bailly, the president of the

Assembly. Furthermore, they would “yield only to the force of the bayonet,” said

Mirabeau.

The king, Louis XVI, acknowledged the changes in the situation. However, he dismissed Necker and amassed troops in the suburbs of Paris. This prompted the mass of

Paris to “storm the Bastille,” on July 14, 1789. The Bastille was a political prison that stood as a symbol of despotism. At the time there were only nine prisoners, none of whom was really important, and none were being held illegally or because of their politics. However, the people revolted, took over the city and overcame absolutism and the day became a French national holiday. The army dissolved itself. The Marquis de

Lafayette (1757-1834) established a National Guard that was a militia of citizens wearing

185 the tri-color cockade. The consequences were that peasant uprisings happened all over

France. The first wave of emigration of the nobility took place at this time as they feared for their lives. There was a collapse of public administration. Following the example of

Paris, autonomous communes were established. Under the impact of the mass uprisings, the National Assembly on August 4-5, 1789 abolished the feudal order and freed the peasants. A society that had been differentiated by estates now became one made up of classes free of restrictions in terms of office holding and trades.

On August 26, 1789 The Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen made the proclamation of liberty, equality, fraternity. This meant personal liberty, equality before the law, and the brotherhood of man. This document was influenced greatly by Thomas

Jefferson’s Virginia Bill of Rights.

However, famine and fear of counter-revolution drove the masses of Paris to further acts of violence. October 5, 1789 was marked by a procession of the market women to

Versailles. The king and the National Assembly were forced to transfer to Paris and to the Tuileries, the royal residence in the city. From this time on the National Assembly was under the pressure of the common citizens. The new dress of the people, the

“Phrygian cap” and the “sans-culottes”(long trousers, the French translation literally means “without breeches”) was generally accepted. Also the people had to address each other as citizen instead of their class designations such as “monsieur” or “my lord.”

To ease the financial difficulties of the nation, Bishop Tallyeyrand-Perigord (1754-

1838) who had been excommunicated by the Catholic Church in 1791, proposed the confiscation of the property of the Church in exchange for assignats (notes issued as paper currency that became legal tender in 1790). Hence, as of October 10, 1789 the

186 property of the Catholic Church was seized and sold. Negatively, this led to an inflationary period. Positively, the purchase of this national property led to the growth of a new class of propertied citizens.

Political clubs were established in Paris. They were modeled after the English example. Bailly and Lafayette led the moderate Feuillants. Danton, Desmoulins, and

Marat led the radical Cordeliers. The Jacobins were named after the dissolved monastery of St. Jacob. Maximilien Francois Marie Isidore de Robespierre (1758-1794) led the

Jacobins as they thought of themselves as the “holy league against the enemies of liberty” and as the “watchdogs of the revolution.” These groups met in closed meetings and created an efficient organization extending all through France.

In July 1790, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy was made policy. The Catholic

Church was made into a state church. Monasteries and orders were dissolved and priests were to be elected, take an oath and be paid by the state. Most of the clergy refused the oath leading to a conflict between Church and state. The priests who remained loyal to the Pope and the traditional Roman Catholic Church became part of a counter-revolution with the emigres and nobles in hiding.

In June 1791, Louis XVI attempted to flee Paris. The king made it as far as

Verennes when he was recognized and made to return to Paris. Once there he was deprived of all political power and became a prisoner.

On September 3, 1791, the Assembly proclaimed the “New Constitution.” It became a model for all liberal constitutions throughout Europe during the 19th century. It called for 1) a constitutional monarchy, comparable to England but with weak executive powers. The king would have a limited veto power. 2) A popular assembly was to be

187 elected indirectly on the basis of limited suffrage. It was to be restricted to active male citizens who owned property. 3) There would be elections for all officials, judges, and jurors. 4) There would be open courts for all to observe. 5) The nation would be organized into 83 departments with an autonomous administration for each one. What had been provinces were now made to be like counties or districts with an autonomous administration for each one. 6) There would be guarantees of human rights, equality before the law and private property.

THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY 1791-1792. Of the newly elected 745 deputies to the Legislative Assembly, 50% of them were lawyers who lacked political experience.

They were grouped into factions. The loyalist Feuillants numbered about 20 but they dissolved March 20, 1792. The Girondists were made up of 250 members. They were republicans and opposed centralized power as they represented the propertied bourgeoisie. The Jacobins had 30 members. They were radical advocates of centralized power who influenced the masses through agitation and newpapers and they dominated the Paris Commune. The Independents were those who lacked any clear program.

On April 1792, France declared war on Austria in order to divert attention from domestic problems but also in reaction to agitation by emigrees abroad and fear of the

Habsburgs. This began the so-called wars of the coalition. Captain Rouget de Lisle composed the music and text of the Marsellaise, the battle-hymn of the revolution and the

French National Anthem.

The king exercised his limited veto in the Remonstrances against decrees persecuting priests refusing the oath of the coalition. Military failures caused consternation to the revolution. Moreover, the Duke of Brunswick proclaimed the Brunswick Manifesto on

188 July 25, 1792 calling for the liberation of the king. A group of emigrees then stormed the Tuileries on August 10, 1792 in order to free the king. The royal family was moved and interned as prisoner in the “Temple.” In retaliation, the Girondists demanded the abolition of the monarchy and the election of a republican National Convention. George

Jacques Danton (1756-94) became the minister of justice. Danton, Jean Paul Marat

(1743-93), and the commune caused the “September Massacre” from September 2-7,

1792 to kill off as many of the aristocratic families in the prisons as was possible. A second wave of noble emigres left the country. Among them Lafayette who became an

Austrian prisoner.

THE NATIONAL CONVENTION 1792-1793. The National Convention was made up of 749 Deputies and in September 1792 France was declared to be a republic. A new republican calendar was introduced. 1792 became the Year One. The months were renamed Fructadore, Thermidore, and other names that had to do with weather and nature. New parties were formed in the National Convention. The Plain took up their seats on the floor of convention hall. They were also still called Girondists, who advocated equality before the law, the sancitity of private property, and local autonomy of administration. The Mountain or Jacobins took up the upper seats in the convention hall. They demanded a centralized administration, and the power to dispose of private property to ease the burden of the poor. Danton, Robespierre, and Marat were some of their members. They made up 110 of the 749 deputies.

Reforms by this convention were as follows: 1) election by manhood suffrage, 2) government no longer required a king or aristocracy, 3) the abolishment of Negro slavery in the colonies, 4) equal status for women, 5) comprehensive law codes that mirrored the

189 original constitution, 6) army reform – officers were now to be promoted by merit. These reforms established a general conscription and a citizen army, and officer careers were now open to talent.

The French army was now to be based on the latest military science; such as, divisions or self-contained units with their own centralized supplies and who acted as a unit on the battlefield.

On January 17, 1793 Robespierre proposed the death penalty and this was accepted by a 361 to 360 vote. The “guillotine” was accepted as the way the death penalty should be implemented. Dr. J. I. Guillotin (1738-1814), a physician, invented and advocated the

“dropping axe” as a more humane procedure of execution. The old ways were thought to be too messy and inefficient. The king was guillotined on January 21, 1793.

Britain and other European powers now entered the wars of the coalition against

France. Military setbacks, famine, inflation, unrest, and royalist peasant uprisings in the countryside all threatened the French revolution.

REIGN OF TERROR 1793-94. These things brought on the “Reign of Terror.”

Fanaticism and severity successfully dealt with all these emergencies in domestic and foreign affairs. In June 1793, a Proclamation of the Constitution of the National

Convention was proclaimed. This meant that absolute popular sovereignty would decide every law through plebiscite voting. This eliminated the need for separation of powers.

However, its provisions could not be realized in practice and so dictatorial politics took over pitting the stronger against the weaker.

In July 1793 the Jacobins drove the Girondists from power. Maximilien Robespierre

(1758-94), a lawyer, established a dictatorship with the help of Marat and Danton. Marat,

190 however, was murdered by Charlotte Corday and glorified as a martyr. Hereafter,

Danton proposed that a Committee of Public Safety be created by the provisional government with absolute powers. This committee consisted of 9 members elected by the National Convention. Anybody they considered a threat to the revolution no matter how innocent was sent to prison to be tried. A Revolutionary Tribunal exercised radical laws and judicial terror. For all practical purposes all human rights were suspended.

Anybody could be guillotined. By July 1794, 1,251 “suspicious persons” had been guillotined, among them, the Girondist politician, Bailly, the chemist Lavoisier, Philip of

Orleans or “Citizen Egalite,” and Queen Marie Antoinette.

Commissars of the Committee of Public Safety suppressed uprisings and unrest through mass liquidations. The generals La Hoche and Kleber conducted a war of extermination against the loyalists under Charette De La Contrie and the Vendee and against the Chouans (named after their leader Cottereau) in Brittany. The atheism of the so-called Hebertists (named after the Jacobin Hebert, 1757-94) intensified at the same time. All churches were proclaimed to be only buildings and were closed. Notre Dame was proclaimed to be the “temple of reason.” Robespierre, now called “the incorruptible,” ordered the execution of extreme Hebertists in March 1794 as well as moderate “indulgents” such as Danton and his followers in April 1794. Robespierre became the only true bearer of the Revolution in his own eyes and he even saw his friends as threats. He wanted to be virtuous and perfect and everyone else had to be within this definition and so all were expendable if not conformable. In other words, madness took over.

191 In May 1794 France saw the Abolition of Christianity in favor of the “Cult of

Reason,” including the adoption of a new chronology. Each month was to have 3 weeks of 10 days each. Robespierre celebrated the festival of the “Supreme Being” in June

1794.

The Terror culminated in the “great purification” by the Jacobins. The reformation of the revolutionary tribunal where “moral proof” sufficed to cause condemnation, united the opposition in the National Convention and brought about the July 27-28, 1794 fall of

Robespierre. In other words, before Robespierre condemned them all and had them killed, they condemned him. He tried to commit suicide by firing his gun into his mouth but only succeeded in breaking his jaw. Robespierre and 21 of his adherents, including

St. Just, were executed by the guillotine.

THE DIRECTORY. In response to the Terror and popular dictatorship in September

1795 a new constitution provided for a weak executive in a government with 5 directors.

Deputies to the two chambers of the Council of Elders (250 members) and the Council of the 500 were elected indirectly. The views of the propertied bourgeoisie were thereby recognized. With the threat of Robespierre’s puritanism and perfectionism gone, Paris relaxed and indulged in pleasure and luxury in its salons. Meanwhile, the Directory was too weak to prevent unrest on the right by royalists and on the left by early forms of communists. Francois Noel Babeuf was an early communist leader born in 1760 and executed in 1797.

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) supported the suppression of the royalists on

October 5, 1795 and gained in power and stature. As the directors hoped to use

192 Napoleon, he planned to use them. Attempts to solve the economy and fiscal crisis did not prevent public bankruptcy.

On September 4, 1797 a Coup d’ etat on the 18th of Fructidor was held by General

Augereau to rid the state of royalist corruption. Royalist leaders fled the country. The

Directory now with three leaders became more and more dependent on Napoleon

Bonaparte.

NAPOLEON AND THE WARS OF THE COALITION

In April 1792, France declared war against Austria. The French saw themselves as a nation of pioneers in the struggle against absolutism and feudalism. They demanded that

France include all her natural borders, its frontiers, the Alps and the Rhine River.

THE FIRST WAR OF THE COALITION was fought between 1792 and 1797. At first it pitted France against Austria, and Prussia. Advances by the coalition armies and the manifesto of revenge inflamed French national feelings. On September 30, 1792 the

Battle of Valmy became the turning point of the war. The Prussian army retreated.

General Dumouriez (1739-1823) was victorious for the French and he conquered

Belgium. Savoy was also annexed. In February 1793 Britain and a number of other

European powers entered the war.

The domestic crisis of the revolution and the Terror also affected the French conduct of the war. March 1793 the French were defeated at Neerwinden. Austria reconquered

Belgium and continued to threaten Paris. The British navy intervened in the

Mediterranean. France responded with total mobilization. Carnot (1753-1823) reformed the army and brought its strength to one million (4% of the French population). Political commissars watched over the officers to make sure they did the will of the French

193 Revolutionary government. Thus the French won victories at Wattignies in 1793 and

Feurus in 1794 and won back Belgium a second time. The Batavian Republic

(Indonesia) was proclaimed in Holland to be on the side of the French. Britain made invasion attempts at Toulon and Quiberon but failed. However, the British were able to occupy the Dutch colonies of Ceylon and Capetown.

The Peace of Basle took place in 1795. Prussia needed peace in order to fight in

Poland. Prussia surrendered its possessions on the left bank of the Rhine River in exchange for compensation in the form of territory on the right bank. A line of demarcation secured the neutrality of Northern Germany until 1806. Spain concluded the

Peace Treaty of Idlefonso in 1796 and entered the war on the side of France against Great

Britain. Britain destroyed the Spanish fleet at Cape St. Vincent. Austria continued to carry on the war with Britain’s financial aid. Archduke Charles (1771-1847) repulsed

French advances into southern Germany at Amberg and Wurzburg. Logistical problems paralyzed the French army in upper Italy.

The new concepts of “citizens” or the people and the “nation” (instead of the kingdom) brought on a revolution in warfare, in the conduct of war and military organization. This led to the “Age of Nationalism” in the 19th century. 1) Total war involved all the people with conscription for military duty and labor services took the place of the wars of the cabinets and mercenaries. 2) The massing of troops made decisive battles possible. The strategy of exhausting the enemy by forcing him to march and thus to tire his soldiers and preserve one’s own troops became ineffective. 3) Flexible operations in loosely formed lines were superior to attacks in closed lines. The old linear tactics were used to prevent desertions.

194 4) Provisioning troops through storehouses took the place of requisitioning by fighting troops. 5) Promotion was based on courage and accomplishment and the army was no longer dependant on the noble birth of its officers.

In the hands of Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), the new French army became invincible. Born in Ajaccio, Corsica, the artillery officer since 1785 and apostle of

Rousseau joined the revolution at an early stage. After the siege of Toulon in 1793, he became the youngest revolutionary general. He was arrested as a Jacobin after the fall of

Robespierre, but was freed later and entrusted with the suppression of Paris in the “Day of the Sections.” Subsequently he was made commander of the army in upper Italy.

Napoleon, as the “little corporal,” mastered the crisis of the revolutionary army and conquered Lombardy in a lightning campaign. In 1797 the French advanced in Italy and took Mantua in 1797. The Peace of Tolentino was made with Pope Pius VI in February.

Napoleon advanced into Carinthia and the provisional Peace of Leoben was made in

April. His successes obligated the government and the people to support him.

Contributions of the “liberated Italians” supported the bankrupt Directory and promoted the Napoleonic legend by transferring major Italian works of art to the Louvre.

The “savior” of France dictated the Peace of Campo Formio in October 1797.

Austria agreed to surrender the left bank of the Rhine, that is, 63,000 square kilometres of land with a population of 3.5 million. Austria exchanged Belgium and Milan for Venice, which had maintained its own republic for a thousand years. The French extended their own system by creating satellite states through daughter republics. Thus, in 1797 the

Cisalpine (Milan) and Ligurian (Genoa) republics were established. In 1798 civil war brought the transformation of Switzerland into the Helvetian Republic. The Papal States

195 were made into the Roman Republic after the capture of Rome and the imprisonment of the Pope. Naples became the Parthenopean Republic in 1799.

THE CAMPAIGN IN EGYPT: Napoleon received the supreme command in the war against Britain, which was to be hit indirectly through the Mediterranean. He occupied

Malta and landed in Alexandria with 232 ships, 2,000 cannon, 32,300 soldiers as well as

175 engineers and scholars to explore the country. He defeated the Mamelukes near the

Pyramids and captured Cairo. In 1798 the British won a naval battle against the French at Aboukir with Lord Nelson. Thus, the French army was cut off from France. A French advance to Syria in 1799 failed at the gates of Acre. Even a victorious land battle at

Aboukir, near Alexandria, failed to save the undertaking. Russia and the Ottoman

Empire concluded an alliance against the French. Malta and the Mediterranean Sea came under British control. French rule over Egypt lasted until 1802. Napoleon left this army to its fate in order to return to Europe and Paris.

THE WARS OF THE COALITIONS: Fighting in various coalitions, the European powers opposed the spread of revolutionary ideas and the expansion of the French

Republic under the leadership of Napoleon from 1799. The wars altered the political balance of power in favor of the Napoleonic domination of the Continent. At the same time, they aroused the national resistance of the European peoples and their readiness for reform, thereby, laying the foundations for modern states. The centers of resistance were

Austria, which after 1805 came under the political leadership of Count Stadion (1763-

1824), and Britain under Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger, which remained unconquered. Britain extended its naval and colonial dominance and in overcoming the

196 obstacles of economic warfare with France and the Continental System to become the strongest commercial and industrial nation in the world.

The First War of the Coalition took place from 1792 to 1797. Pitt the Youner was able to gain the adherence of Austria and of the Grand Master of the Knights of Malta

(The Knights of St. John or the Hospitalers), and the Russian Tsar Paul I (1796-1802) when the French occupied Malta and the British were victorious at Aboukir.

The Second War of the Coalition (1799-1802) started when Naples attacked the

Roman Republic. The Allies made the initial successes. Archduke Charles defeated

Jourdan at Osterach and Stokach in March 1799; Massena at Zurich in June; Surovov defeated Moreau at Cassano in April; Jovi defeated Jourbert in August. Russian operations in Switzerland and a British-Russian invasion near Alkamaar in Holland remained unsuccessful. Paul I of Russia left the Coalition after the British occupied

Malta.

Meanwhile, Napoleon had left his army in Egypt in August 1799. He landed in

France where he overthrew the Directory and established a military dictatorship. After unsuccessful attempts at concluding peace, he assumed command of the army in Italy. In

1800 France won victories at Marengo by Napoleon and at Hohenlinden by Moreau. In

1801 the Peace of Luneville was made and Austria had to confirm earlier conditions for

French occupation of Europe. In 1801 Russia, Sweden, Denmark, and Prussia created a pro-French Northern Coalition for the protection of neutral trade. England retaliated with a raid on Copenhagen by Lord Nelson. After France concluded a peace treaty with

Russia, England was left isolated and Pitt fell out of government power. In March 1802, the Peace of Amiens was made. Here Napoleon reached the first high point of his power.

197 England surrendered all colonial conquests made on French colonies in the last years except for Ceylon and Trinidad. In turn, the French abandoned Egypt.

In 1802, Napoleon reorganized Italy. He restored the Papal States and the Bourbon

Kingdom of Naples. The Grand Duchy of Tuscany became the kingdom of Etruria, the

Cisalpine Republic became the Italian Republic with Napoleon as its president.

Piedmont remained under French military administration. Franco-British tensions resulted from a restoration of the French colonial empire. France had acquired the

Louisiana Territory from Spain in 1800 and the French had landed on Haiti and

Martinique. Tensions also resulted from the French occupation of Hanover in 1803 in defiance of the terms of the Peace of Basle. France also introduced protective tariffs to keep Britain out of the Continent. In 1804 Napoleon tried to make preparations for an invasion of Britain. Napoleon said, “Should we be able to control the English Channel for 6 hours, we will be the masters of the world!” With William Pitt the Younger back in power, Britain did not surrender Malta to French attack. Pitt also formed a new coalition with Tsar Alexander I (1801-25) of Russia, Sweden and Naples.

In 1805 the Third War of the Coalition took place. Napoleon encircled the Austrian army and made them surrender at Ulm. Napoleon entered Vienna. On December 2, 1805 the famous battle of Austerlitz took place or what was called “The Three Emperors’

Battle.” It resulted in a brilliant victory for Napoleon over Russia and Austria. Prussia had tried to mediate a peace but it was too late. On December 12, 1805 the Treaty of

Schonbrunn granted Prussia the Electorate of Hanover in exchange for Cleves,

Neuenburg and Ansbach-Bayreuth. Prussia joined the Napoleonic system through a pact of mutual assistance.

198 In the Peace of Augsburg (December 25, 1805), Austria lost Venetia and Dalmatia to the Italian Republic. Bavaria was given Tyrol, Voralberg, Lindau and the Breisgau.

Baden acquired Baden and Wurttemberg. Austria gained Salzburg and acknowledged the elevation of German princes in rank. After defeating England, Napoleon broke his treaty with Prussia and offered Hanover to England in order to gain peace with Britain. Prussia misunderstood the situation and was offended and they initiated the Fourth War of the

Coalition (1806-7). However, because Prussia was left in an isolated position, it lost easily and capitulated to France.

In 1806 Napoleon proclaimed the Continental System in Berlin. Napoleon intended to isolate Great Britain and keep it from trading with any Continental nation. The Peace of Tilsit over Prussia became the second high point in Napoleon’s career. Russia was now invited into an alliance with Napoleon to divide Europe into French and Russian spheres of influence. Russia joined the Continental System.

In 1809 in the Fifth War of the Coalition, Austria created a national uprising but it failed. The Peace of Schonbrun separated the Danubian monarchy from the sea. The successor of Count Stadion, Prince Metternich successfully effected a reorientation of

Austrian policies along Napoleonic lines. Treaties of assistance incorporated Prussia and

Austria into the Napoleonic system.

THE CONSULATE 1799-1804 NAPOLEON AT HOME IN FRANCE:

When Napoleon took over in the 1799 Coup d’etat of 18 Brumaire, he was aided by his brother Lucien. Napoleon dissolved the incompetent Directory and broke up the Council of 500 and then formed a provisional government that included Fouche (1759-1820) as minister of police and Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord(1754-1838), as his

199 foreign minister. The new Constitution of the Consolate made Napoleon the First Consul with two others below him. He alone had the power to initiate legislation and appoint all army officers, government officials, judges and the 80 members of the Senate. The governmental body below Napoleon served only as a forum for discussion and was elected indirectly. This military dictatorship in democratic wrappings was accepted by a plebiscite with only 1,562 voting against this new government. Napoleon was thus chosen First Consul for a term of ten years.

The educational system was uniformly organized into primary, secondary and higher schools and controlled and regimented by the state. Emphasis was on formalistic-logical subjects such as Latin, mathematics and applied natural sciences. Administrative and educational centralization characterize France to the present day.

Pope Pius VII and the Catholic Church renounced all claims for the return of Church property taken during the French revolution by the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. The

Concordat of 1801 that remained in effect until 1905 tied the clergy and the Catholic population to the state. The state appointed bishops who received state salaries and loyalty oaths were made to the state. In 1811 the National Council renewed their conflicts with the church with the closure of ecclesiastical schools and seminaries.

In 1804 the Code Civil or the Code Napoleon guaranteed personal liberty, equality before the law, private property, civil marriage and the right of the divorce. In the courts defendants were presumed guilty before being proven innocent.

Social stratification continued as the upper bourgeoisie remained the dominant element in society. The émigré nobles were requested to return. Careers in government or public office were open to all. In 1802 Napoleon established the Legion of Honour.

200 The Regime was backed up by censorship of the press, a spy system and a police apparatus. Critics were not tolerated.

In terms of military organization, conscription raised one to three million soldiers between 1806 and 1812 (41% of those qualified to serve). In 1804 a royalist conspiracy was uncovered. Although not involved, the Bourbon Duke D’Enghien was abducted from Ettenheim in Baden and became the victim of judicial murder. To secure his position, Napoleon caused the Senate to propose a plebiscite on the question of a hereditary empire.

THE NAPOLEONIC EMPIRE: The Coronation of Napoleon I as Emperor of the

French took place in 1804. Members of his family received titles of princes. Ministers and generals were elevated to the positions of high dignitaries and marshals. In 1807

Napoleon established a new nobility with the system of primogeniture and hereditary titles. By 1914 there were 31 dukes, 451 counts, and 1500 barons. Continuous annexations extended the territory of the empire.

The Imperial System was a rational creation of Napoleonic hegemony over Europe.

It was organized after 1807 on the creation of states headed by family members. It included dependent vassal states and allies. The French Marshal Bernodotte (Charles

XIV of Sweden) was elected heir to the Swedish throne in 1810. To justify his policies,

Napoleon pointed to parallels in history, that is, to the Roman and Carolingian Empires.

However, personal ambition for power played a large role in them. In addition, the

British enemy forced him to a stricter concentration on holding power over his empire.

States that refused to obey the 1807 Milan Decree intensifying the Continental System of

201 protective barriers and tarriffs against British and enemy commerce were occupied.

Portugal was occupied in 1807, Etruria and Rome in 1808-9, and Germany in 1810.

Napoleon’s occupation had important consequences for Europe. 1) The Code

Napoleon spread liberal ideas, the overcoming of feudalism, and the introduction of modern law codes. 2) It meant the development of states with centralized bureaucracies and public educational systems controlled by the state. 3) Alien French rule helped to consolidation of territories that had not been political units before and this led to nationalism. 4) Since the French economy received preferential treatment, this caused indignation and shortages. This did mean the expansion of the textile industries.

However, because of the Continental System, there were increasing shortages of colonial goods, such as, cotton and cane sugar. This led to the increase in prices for manufactured goods, staples and products. It led, for instance, into the making of sugar from beets.

Smuggling, black markets and corruption increased. 5) As a partner of Napoleon, Russia gained in importance and gained new territories including Finland in 1809.

In 1810 Napoleon married Marie-Louise, the daughter of Francis I of Austria. This was an attempt on Napoleon’s part to gain legitimacy in the eyes of the old aristocracy of

Europe and to be accepted, hopefully, even by his enemy England. However, he was never recognized as a legitimate monarch. By 1812 the French Empire was at its greatest with 152 departments, containing fifty million out of the 175 million inhabitants of

Europe.

THE DISSOLUTION OF THE GERMAN EMPIRE

The 1797-99 Congress of Rastatt attempted to reconstitute Germany in view of the territorial losses of German princes on the left bank of the Rhine after their loss to

202 Napoleon. Napoleon reinforced this reconstitution with the Peace of Junevile in February

1801. Napoleon’s aims were 1) the dissolution of the German empire, 2) the creation of

German middle states as a political counterweight to Austria, 3) the obligation of German princes to vassal loyalty through granting territorial additions.

The political reorganization took place in four stages. First, the secularization of the ecclesiastical states were modeled after the French through a deputation appointed by the

German Reichstag which was bound by Russian-French plans in matters of territorial compensation. In 1803 the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss divided all ecclesiastical territories, except Mainz. Also 45 of the 51 imperial cities, small principalities and counties totalling 112 imperial states with a population of three million were also divided and put into larger territories. The main beneficiaries were Baden, Prussia, Wurttemberg and Bavaria which all grew much bigger. Secondly, in 1804, 350 imperial knights lost their status and were subject to the empire only. Thirdly, German princes were elevated in rank with the approval of Napoleon. In 1804 Francis II (1792-1806) assumed the imperial title for Austria and reigned as Francis I until 1835. In 1805 Wurttemberg and

Bavaria became kingdoms. Fourthly, 16 southern and western German states committed open treason to the German empire by forming the Confederation of the Rhine in 1806 under a Napoleonic protectorate. They were obliged to render Napoleon military assistance.

On August 6, 1806 Francis II gave up the German imperial crown which ended the

Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The people were painfully aware of the humiliation of the nation but accepted it. The Nuremberg bookseller Palm was executed

203 in 1806 by the French because of his pamphlet called “Germany in its Deepest

Humiliation.” He became the only martyr for the old Germany.

THE COLLAPSE OF PRUSSIA

Prussia became dependent on Napoleon. To counteract Napoleon’s arbitrary actions in border and treaty violations, Prussia formed a coalition with Russia and Saxony. An ultimatum demanded the withdrawal of all French troops East of the Rhine and the dissolution of the Confederation of the Rhine. This led to the Fourth War of the Coalition in 1806-7. Following a preliminary engagement at Saalfeld, the obsolete Prussian and

Saxon armies suffered disastrous defeats in October 1806 at the battles of Jena and

Auerstadt. Prussia collapsed morally and militarily and the royal residence was transferred to Konigsberg. Napoleon occupied Berlin unopposed. The Prussian army was soundly defeated at Prenslau and Ratkau. Only the fortresses of Kolberg and Glatz resisted. In December 1806 the Peace of Posen was made with Saxony which joined the

Confederation of the Rhine. In February 1807 after General Scharnhorst prevented the

French from taking advantage of their victory, Frederick William III (1797-1840) fled to

Memel. In June 1807, the Russians were defeated at Friedland. The Peace of Tilsit in

July 1807 almost brought the dissolution of Prussia if it had not been for the intervention of Russia. Prussia lost her territories west of the Elbe and the formerly Polish territories except for West Prussia. Danzig was made a republic to be garrisoned by the French.

Prussia was to remain under French occupation pending substantial reparations. Its army was reduced to 42,000 men. Newly created states were the Kingdom of Westphalia

204 under Napoleon’s brother Jerome and the Grand Duchy of Warsaw that was in personal union with Saxony.

Austria attempted an uprising in 1809. Prussian help and intervention failed because of the French occupation of the country and the influence of Tsar Alexander I. Napoleon pushed the Austrian army back into Bohemia. In May 1809 at the Battle of Aspern

Napoleon suffered his first defeat at the hands of Archduke Charles. In July 1809 the

Austrian army was defeated at Wagram. The Archduke Charles and Count Stadion who had led the uprising resigned. In October 1809 the Peace of Schonbrunn made sure

Austria was cut off from the sea as Northern Italy was lost. The Austrian army was limited to 150,000 men and the uprising was over.

NATIONAL UPHEAVAL IN SPAIN

Napoleon planned an attack on Portugal as it still traded with Britain. The

Portuguese royal family (John VI) fled to Brazil. In February 1808 Marshal Murat

(1767-1815) led the reinforced French troops against Madrid. Charles VI of Spain was forced to abdicate in favor of his son Ferdinand VII after an uprising in Aranjuez against

Godoy, the pro-French favorite of the king. Concerned for the representation of his own interests, Napoleon interfered in the family quarrels of the Spanish Bourbons and forced both Charles IV (1788-1808) and Ferdinand VII (1803-33) to abdicate in favor of his own brother Joseph in May 1808. Murat became king of Naples. Cortes of Oviedo and

Cartagena thereupon called for national resistance. In July 1808 a French corps of 23,000 was defeated at Bailen. Joseph fled and the British general Arthur Wellesley (1769-

1852)(Lord in 1809 and Duke of Wellington from 1814) landed in Portugal pushing

205 Junot and the French back. The Emperor Napoleon intervened personally with 300,000 men. In the 1808-9 Spanish Campaign, Napoleon occupied Madrid, captured Saragossa and King Joseph returned. The Austrian uprising interrupted this campaign. French forces pushed back a British expeditionary force. However, the guerilla warfare waged by the gerrilleros and led by nobility and clergy continued to hamper and divert most of the French forces.

In 1809, Napoleon’s annexation of the Papal States and the arrest of the Pope stiffened the resistance of the Spanish people who were loyal to the Catholic Church.

Wellington advanced and repulsed Massena’s attack on Lisbon in 1810. During

Napoleon’s Russian campaign, Wellington liberated Madrid in 1812. In 1813-24

Wellington’s victory at Vitoria during his last offensive finally liberated Spain and led to the capture of Toulouse.

THE RUSSIAN CAMPAIGN OF NAPLEON 1812

Economic difficulties prompted the Tsar Alexander I to discontinue Russia’s role in the Continental System in December 1812. Preferential tariffs favored British trade in urgently needed industrial goods. The removal of the Duke of Oldenburg, a relative of the Tsar, from his throne and the disregard for Russian interests in Poland and Turkey increased tensions between France and Russia.

French troops crossed the Niemen River in June 1812 without a declaration of war.

The left wing operated in Courland to secure the flank. Napoleon advanced with the main army past Vilna in the direction of Moscow which was then occupied without resistance after victories at Smolensk in August and at Borodino in September.

206 The leader of the “great patriotic war” and the Russian national hero Kutuzov (1745-

1813), relied on the vast Russian expanses and decided on a flexible defensive guerilla type warfare and thereby avoiding decisive battles. His tactics became for the Russian people the symbol of the invincibility of their land.

After the fall of Moscow, Alexander continued to fight but from a safe distance.

Peace offers by Napoleon were rejected. Logistical difficulties, the burning of Moscow, including destruction of the Kremlin, and the coming of winter forced Napoleon into a belated retreat in October. The army was constantly pursued by Russian troops and had to abandon its winter quarters at Smolensk.

The crossing of the Berezina River near Studyanka in November became a catastrophe. Hunger, disease and the freezing cold led to the complete dissolution of the

French Army. Only 30,000 men survived out of an army of 3 million men. Napoleon left his troops and appeared unexpectedly in Paris after a hurried journey undertaken to strengthen his shaky regime and raise new armies. There had been an attempted coup by

General Malet in October. By the end of 1812 the remnants of the main French army reached the Prussian border. The catastrophe was widely regarded as a divine judgment.

THE WARS OF LIBERATION 1813-1815

The catastrophe befalling Napoleon’s Grande Army kindled the national resistance of the European peoples in opposition to alien French rule. As Prussia rose up against

France it allowed the Russian army to pass through in pursuit of the French. In February

1813, the Treaty of Kalisz allowed Russia to obtain Poland in exchange for the rest of

Prussia which included Saxony.

207 Under pressure from Prussian patriots, Frederick William III declared war on France in March 1813. The establishment of the Iron Cross as a military decoration and the king’s appeal to his people evoked a spontaneous mood for sacrifice from the populace.

Independent units of mounted riflemen were formed and donations of money and material helped transform reservists and volunteers into troops of the line. Prussia carried the main burden after Russia in the Wars of Liberation. Six percent of the population saw active service in the army.

The improvised Prussian and French conscript armies met during the spring campaign at Grossgorschen. Napoleon drove the allies in the direction of Silesia. But

Swedish troops landed in Pomerania in May and Britain joined the coalition in June

1813. Austria entered the war in August only after peace negotiations in Prague failed with France. During the Autumn campaign three coalition armies advanced concentrically while retaining their flexibility. Napoleon’s victory at Dresden in August and other partial successes did not prevent the French army from being encircled. From

October 16th to19th, 1813, the Battle of the Nations took place at Leipzig where more than 100,000 were killed or wounded. The Coalition won the victory but an orderly retreat allowed Napoleon to get back across the Rhine.

The consequences were immense. The Napoleonic system collapsed. The

Confederation of the Rhine that had backed Napoleon dissolved. Germany, Holland and

Upper Italy were liberated. Naples defected from Napoleon’s cause. Denmark having backed France had to give up Norway to Sweden. Prussia obtained Pomerania.

208 THE CAMPAIGN IN FRANCE

The Prussian general Blucher (1742-1819) and Schwarzenberg of Austria crossed the

Rhine at Kaub and Basle during the winter. Napoleon overcame Blucher at Brienne, but was defeated by him at La Rothiere. Napoleon was, however, able to preserve his freedom of action through energetic offensives in a number of other places especially since the conduct of the war by the coalition was obstructed by political problems.

The coalition powers agreed to a new joint action in the Treaty of Chaumont in March

1814.

On March 31, 1814 the Allies entered Paris and Tallyrand set up a provisional

French government that removed Napoleon from office. On April 6, 1814 the army forced Napoleon to abdicate at Fontainebleau. Napoleon was granted the island of Elba as a principality, and he received the services of a guard of honor of 800 men to protect him.

From 1814-1824 in Louis XVIII the Bourbons returned to the throne. The king issued a liberal constitution, but he favored nobility and clergy and in essence wished to set the clock back to the world before 1789 and the French Revolution. On May 1, 1814, the Peace of Paris was made. Moderate peace conditions were given for France on the basis of the territorial status quo of 1792.

THE HUNDRED DAYS

The tensions and problems among the allies diverted their attention at the Congress of Vienna. This led Napoleon to take advantage of the situation and to land at Cannes in

March 1815. He assembled the core of the French army, promised democratic reforms, and entered Paris. Louis XVIII fled to Ghent. Murat, who aspired to the crown of Italy,

209 took Napoleon’s side, but was defeated by the Austrians in May 1815 at the battle of

Tolentino. Ferdinand I (1816-25) became the King of the Two Sicilies. Following the immediate proscription of Napoleon, the two main armies of the victors under Wellington and Blucher and Gneisenau advanced to the south and west respectively. Napoleon opened the campaign in Belgium with on 120,000 soldiers. Blucher was beaten at Ligny.

However, he was able to join his toops to Wellington’s army in time during the June

1815 Battle of Waterloo. The last Napoleonic army was destroyed. The coalition made a second entry into Paris. Napoleon placed himself under British protection. He was deported to the Atlantic island of St. Helena where he died in 1821. His ashes were transferred to Paris in 1840, where they were laid to rest in Les Invalides.

In November 1815 the 2nd Peace of Paris was signed. France was forced to pay a war indemnity of 700 million Francs among the concessions made. Napoleon’s time in

French history was finally over.

QUESTIONS: 1. Explain the different phases of the Revolution. What were the important decisions and happenings? Who were the important people and what did they do? 3. Was Napoleon a despot and dictator or a freedom fighter for the peoples of Europe? 4. What were Napoleon’s policies at home and how did he govern? 5. How did the Wars of the Coalition go and how was Napoleon finally defeated? 6. What effect did Napoleon have on Europe thereafter?

FURTHER READING:

The Anchor Atlas of World History. Vols 1 & 2. Garden City, New York: Anchor

Press/Doubleday, 1974 & 1978.

210 James Roberts. The Counter-Revolution in France, 1787-1830. New York: St.

Martin’s, 1990.

Timothy Tackett. Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth Century

France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University

Press, 1986.

211 LIBERALISM & NATIONALISM: REVOLUTIONS OF 1830 & 1848

Gary K. Pranger

Liberalism in the 17th and 18th centuries meant the middle class, or bourgeois class of lawyers, doctors, professors, merchants, industrialists, and businessmen. They were interested in law centered, constitutional governments, with representative legislatures, and the right to vote with freedom and protection for life, liberty and property. This middle class wanted to be either represented in the government or part of it in order to justify and direct taxes for which they paid the most in the newly industrializing nations.

The power of liberal ideas could be found most easily in students and their professors.

They advocated social reforms to meet the needs of the people and the extension of the right to vote for all qualified citizens.

Nationalism was an intense feeling that one’s institutions, language, arts, culture, food, and unique people should be preserved. In “Nationalism” one could find liberal or conservative people working against or with each other in defining, creating, and perpetuating this heritage. Therefore the politics of nationalism could be maintained by conservatives or monarchists like Bismarck in creating a politically conservative

Germany or by liberals like Louis Kossuth in Hungary.

These differing groups with their differing ideas about nationalism clashed after the

Congress of Vienna in 1815. The Congress restored the old monarchist governments to their pre-French revolutionary ways. However, revolutionary ideas and the Industrial

Revolution could not make time go backward and it was impossible to maintain the old order for long. Adjustments had to be made soon or revolutions would return. Thus the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 across Europe were in many ways predictable.

212 THE CONGRESS OF VIENNA 1814-15

The third great congress of modern history was mainly the work of Prince Clemens von Metternich (1773-1859). He was a conservative diplomat who rejected the liberal and national ideas of the time. He believed that these ideas presented a danger to the old- fashioned monarchial states and empires that he wanted to help preserve. Thus the congress wished to roll back all that had happened since the French Revolution started and Napoleon’s time by restoring Europe to its pre-1792 ways. The French diplomatic minister, Talleyrand, justified the dynastic claims of the Ancien Regime and also wished to restore France to the pre-revolution government and borders. Legitimate princes desired “solidarity” and common principles against revolutionary ideas and movements.

Representatives of almost all European states and princes took part in the congress.

During the course of the congress, the Polish-Saxon question led to the brink of war.

Metternich and Castlereagh of Great Britain were concerned to preserve the balance of power. They protested the annexation of Poland by Russia and of Saxony by Prussia. In

France, the diplomatic and shrewd foreign minister, Talleyrand was a “survivor” in history. He had been the foreign minister under Barras during the original French

Revolution, and then with Napoleon, and then with Louis XVIII, and he survived each crisis and continued to represent France in another new government. He utilized the crisis mood after Napoleon’s 100 days in the congress to improve the international political situation for France. France joined the secret British-Austrian treaty against

Russia and Prussia in January 1815. As a result of Metternich’s mediation, especially under the impact of Napoleon’s return from Elba, the main powers reached a compromise.

213 The final act of the Congress of Vienna in January 1815 restored a balance of power between the “great powers” – England, France, Austria, Prussia, and Russia. France retained its territorial possessions of 1792 and was checked additionally by a “circle of medium-sized states.” This meant that Sweden made a union with Norway. The United

Netherlands and the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont now came into being. Britain was the main victor over the French. As a reward, England maintained a royal union with the newly created Kingdom of Hanover and it also received Malta, Ceylon, Cape Colony

(South Africa), and Heligoland (the tip of South America).

Russia obtained most of Poland which was allowed to have its own constitution.

Russia rose to become the leading Continental power. Austria gave up the Habsburg

Netherlands (Belgium) in exchange for additions in Galicia, Upper Italy and Dalmatia. It exercised political primacy over a restored Italy. As a multi-national state, it became alienated from Germany, but nevertheless claimed the leadership over the German

Confederation. Prussia received a part of Saxony with Austria. Switzerland was guaranteed “eternal neutrality.” According to the new constitution of August 1815, the confederation of Switzerland consisted of 22 cantons, each with its own constitution.

Prussia received the Rhenish province and Westphalia as compensation. These parts grew closer to the entire German confederation and against France. Metternich, in

Article 2 of the June 1815 Act of Confederation, made Austria an overseer of the German

Confederation, “to preserve the internal and external security of Germany and the independence…of German states.” Austria’s interest in this was to keep Germany from uniting into an even greater empire or nation. Between 1815 and 1866 the German

Confederation had 39 members with 35 of the princes that included the kings of Britain

214 (who watched over Hanover), Denmark (who watched over Holstein) and the

Netherlands (who watched over Luxemburg).

Austria and Prussia belonged to the Confederation only with part of their territories.

The Bundestag at Frankfort was a permanent meeting of ambassadors under the chairmanship of Austria. It could be expanded into the Assembly of the Confederation for the deliberation of important decisions. However, it was not a representative popular assembly. Decisions by the Confederation (unanimous or with a two-thirds majority) bound the governments but not their subjects. In the event of war, the Army of the

Confederation consisting of individual contingents supplied by the member states would provide protection. The one concession to liberalism was Article 13 that provided for local assemblies and constitutions.

As Russia came to the Congress of Vienna, it strove for the solidarity of the great powers. Tsar Alexander I had been influenced by a personal Christian revival and by many pious and romantic Russians who wished for a larger unity of Christian empires.

Thus, he established The Holy Alliance in September 1815. The rulers of Greek

Orthodox Russia, Catholic Austria, and Protestant Prussia bound themselves to govern at home in a Christian patriarchal spirit in accordance with the Scriptures and to practice solidarity in foreign affairs. They agreed to intervene against all liberal and national movements and uprisings from their personal responsibility to God and devotion to government by divine right. All European monarchs joined the alliance, except for the

Pope in Rome and the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire. The Holy Alliance was unclear as to its political terms. However, the alliance of “throne and altar” established the first supranational organization to preserve peace in modern history. Metternich used the

215 Holy Alliance as an effective weapon to enforce his conservative policies. The British

Parliament rejected any right of intervention. England became the mainstay and defender of liberal democrats versus this Holy Alliance.

Metternich and Alexander I of Russia attempted to establish cooperation between the great European powers on the basis of regular congresses to safeguard the settlement of

Vienna. Castlereagh supported this balance of power, even though the British proceeded with caution. The “concert of powers” was expanded at the 1818 Congress of Ai-La-

Chapelle by the admission of France into the Holy Alliance. Metternich secured the principle of intervention at the 1820 Congress of Troppau over the objections of Britain.

Gradually Britain became free of political ties to Europe and began their era of “splendid isolation.” However, between 1822 and 1827 Britain remained a protector of the small nations and supported their liberal movements. The solidarity so longed for by the Tzar did not last long. Britain and France formed a liberal western bloc and Russia, Austria, and Prussia formed a conservative eastern bloc.

RESTORATION OF THE BOURBONS 1814-1830

From 1814 to 1824 Louis XVIII returned form exile in Verona. He granted the 1814

Charte Constitutionelle: a two- chamber legislature modeled after the British example

(hereditary peers and a chamber of deputies chosen on the basis of an extremely limited suffrage). Legislative initiative rested with the executive (the king) alone. Ministers responsible to the king exercised the power. The Revolutionary land settlement, equality before the law in the Napoleonic Code and civil rights were acknowledged. The propertied bourgeoisie became the most powerful element in society.

216 In 1815 during the second restoration, a “White Terror” took place against Jacobins and Bonapartists. In cleansing the administration 70,000 arrests were made. Ultra- royalists made short-lived attempts to grasp all power. Napoleon’s generals were executed. The king endeavored to balance the forces of restoration and revolution and sought the support of moderate royalists. The occupation forces left and France was readmitted into the concert of the great powers.

From 1824 to 1830, Charles X ruled in cooperation with the church and the Ultra- royalists. Laws prohibiting sacrilege and controlling the press, the churches, supervision of the schools, the return of the Jesuits, dissolution of the National Guard and the compensation of the emigres all angered the opposition. After 1828 the liberals had a majority in the Chamber of Deputies. In 1830 France conquered Algiers but this could not avert a crisis as ultra-royalist policies dissolved the chamber, censored the press and made changes in the election laws.

This brought about the July Revolution of 1830. Following fighting on the barricades, Charles X abdicated and fled to England. This revolution brought unrest to the other European nations. In Britain, Parliament’s answer was to pass the Great

Reform Bill of 1832. This extended the suffrage, ended the rotten boroughs, and created new representation in Parliament in new city districts. However, the reforms did not reach to the lower class. In Russia, the Decembrist Revolt of 1825 and the Polish revolt of 1830 brought nationalistic liberals to the fore temporarily before they were put down harshly. In Prussia, students demonstrated in 1830 but the unrest was not violent. In

1830 Belgium won her independence. The great European powers guaranteed autonomy and eternal neutrality to the new state in the 1831 London Protocol. The Belgium

217 constitution was made in 1831 granting popular sovereignty, civil rights, and a parliamentary system.

In France, politically more powerful than the Republicans was the bourgeoisie party of Lafayette, Guizot and Thiers. They proclaimed the July Monarchy of Louis Philippe

(1830-1848), the Duke of Orleans who was 57 in 1830. He accepted the republican tricolor French flag, and the title “King of the French.” The revision of the constitution allowed for ministerial responsibility and a broadened suffrage and initiated the “golden age” of the propertied bourgeoisie. Capitalism and industrialism, particularly in mining and railways, gained ground. The “bourgeois monarch” maneuvered between the parties of movement (liberals) and resistance (conservatives) and was able to maintain his position against uprisings on the right and the left. By 1840 the government stabilized through authoritarian cabinets. The government resembled, in the words of de

Tocqueville, a corrupt corporation that bribed its voters with material advantages, such as, the transfer of the railway system into private hands in 1842. 29 million French still had no vote. The working classes were without much protection against unemployment and poverty. Thus liberals and pamphleteers worked in the French press for a democratic republic and a constitution from 1830 to 1840.

Monarchists (Conservatives) worked against Republicans and Republicans worked against Socialists. The Republicans were led by the poet Alphons Lamartine (1790-

1869) and they represented the middle class or bourgeoisie who believed in gradual, orderly reform and the extending of the vote to all qualified or middle class citizens. The

Socialists, led by Louis Blanc, wanted rapid reform and relief programs for the working

218 classes and the poor. Thus, all the people were unsatisfied with Louis Philippe. From

1846-48 there was an economic depression.

FRANCE AND THE SECOND REPUBLIC 1848-52

The prohibition of a banquet sponsoring reforms unleashed the February Revolution of 1848. Barricades were put up in the streets and battles were fought from March 22 to

February 4. Students, workers and the National Guard forced the abdication of Louis

Phillippe and they proclaimed a republic. Formation of a provisional government was made by those around Lamartine who then served as a foreign minister. He prevented the acceptance of the “Red flag” of the Socialists and thus saved the “Tricolour” for France.

As minister of labor, Louis Blanc, proclaimed the “right to work” and established national workshops to take care of the unemployed.

In April 1848 the first general elections for a national assembly were held bringing a bourgeois majority and these elections were conducted under the minister of the interior,

Ledru Rollin (1807-74). In May 1848 there was a massive demonstration of radical socialists under Louis-Auguste Blanqui an even more radical socialist. In June the national workshops were closed because they were unprofitable. Thereupon the June uprising or the second Revolution of 1848 took place with Paris workers fighting. These were the “June Days.” The minister of war, Eugene Cavaignac (1802-57), received dictatorial powers. He ordered the Republican army to open fire against the “red peril.”

The Socialists had an army of 50,000 and 10,000 were killed in defeat.

In November the Constitution of the 2nd Republic was proclaimed. It provided for one chamber and direct elections of the president to head the executive for a four-year

219 term without provision for re-election. Virtually ignoring Cavaignac and Ledru-Rollin, the bourgeoisie, worried about security and gave Napoleon’s nephew a 75% vote in the election of December 1848. Thus, in December 1848 Louis Napoleon who was then forty years old became president. He was a master of bureaucracy and army. He ruled in opposition to parliament, but gained the confidence of the people and the Catholic

Church.

In 1849 he carried out the Roman expedition to preserve the Papal States, which was carried out against the opposition of the Republicans, who were outmaneuvered with the aid of the monarchists who held two thirds of the chamber. A Republican uprising led by

Ledru-Rollin failed in June 1849. Louis Napoleon then used an 1850 law limiting suffrage to stimulate opposition to the chamber, which rejected a constitutional amendment making Napoleon’s re-election possible.

In December 1851 a coup d’etat brought dissolution of the chamber and the arrests of Theirs, Cavaignac and others. A plebiscite approved the new January 1852

Constitution. This one allowed a ten year term for the presidency, a senate, a council of state with legislative powers but actually the legislature could only approve or reject legislation, not initiate or amend it. Also this constitution allowed Napoleon to control the press and the National Guard. A decision of the senate and another plebiscite with

97% of the votes approving brought about the hereditary December 1852 Empire of

Napoleon III who became the Emperor of the French.

In 1848 similar liberal revolutions took place all over Europe but all of them failed.

Denmark, Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, Croatia, Prussia, the Italian states (Piedmont,

Lombardy, Venetia, the Papal States, and Sicily) all had revolutionary movements.

220 Socialism led to the Communist theories of Karl Marx as he too participated in the revolutions of 1848 in Germany and was sent into exile to Switzerland and England.

The results of the Revolutions of 1848 were that most nations slowly began to guarantee the political and social rights of its citizens. At first only the middle class people won out and rose to positions under monarchies in the bureaucracies to obtain and win these rights and later they became leaders. These rights are the legacy of the above struggles.

From 1800 to 1900, significant movements in politics, economics, and social concerns took place. Usually it was the conservatism of the aristocracy versus the liberalism of the better educated. The effects of the “Industrial Revolution” were many.

1) Mechanization increased even though Europe before 1850 was still predominantly agrarian. 2) Population increased up to 40% in France between 1800 and 1850. 3)

Reformed economics, currency reform, improved banking, investments and insurance all came about. 4) Industry and transportation increasingly used steam power.

5) Throughout Europe governments cooperated economically. Examples were the

Customs Union organized in Prussia and the repeal of the Corn Laws in England.

There were changes and improvements in social organization. Land became a little less important and capital investments and industrialism became more important. Class distinctions weakened. The bourgeois and working class both believed that everyone should vote and be able to participate in governmental decisions. In many European nations, the lower class found hope in socialism or socialistic programs since the middle class wished to exclude the working class from voting and governmental rights.

Bourgeois and aristocratic interests began to coalesce. Industrialism increased the need

221 for education. Only three out of ten Englishmen could read in 1835. Research yielded new fields of study: physics, thermodynamics, electricity, chemistry, geology and biology. Medical advancements utilized pathology, methods of diagnosis, anesthetics, morphine and quinine, the stethoscope and the microscope.

In conclusion, in spite of the weaknesses and evils of Western civilization, the colonial system soon spread its benefits around the world.

QUESTIONS: 1. What did the Congress of Vienna hope to accomplish? What did it accomplish? 2. What are the lessons of the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848? 3. Define and explain the positions of the three political forces or parties involved in controlling France? Who are the important personages and what did they want and do? 3.What caused these revolutions to happen all over Europe and what countries came about as a result? Did anything really change?

FURTHER READING:

Victor Hugo. Les Miserables

Paul Johnson. The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830. New York:

Harper/Collins, 1991.

Paul Johnson. Intellectuals. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1988.

Robert Clouse. Richard Pierard, Edwin M. Yamauchi. Two Kingdoms: The Church and Culture Through the Ages. Chicago: Moody Press, 1993.

222 GREAT BRITAIN 1780-1914

Gary K. Pranger

THE DOMESTIC SITUATION AND THE PARLIAMENTARY SYSTEM

Under the impact of the American War of Independence (1776-1783), the government of Lord North fell in 1782. Under the monarchy of George III (1760-1820), the Prime Minister was dependent on Parliament to conduct the government. Small cliques of noble landowners fought each other. They secured their elections from an election system that favored their class. Participation in the government was rewarded with well-paid offices. The power of patronage passed from the king to the Prime -

Minister and remained the source of corruption in the electoral constituencies. The

Tories relied on the established Anglican Church. The Whigs tended more to represent the dissenters or Protestant nonconformists. They aspired to reform Parliament through the abolition of “rotten boroughs” or depopulated older communities that still retained election privileges. This was in favor in the new industrial cities that lacked representation in the ever- increasing rings of urban development and slums. Catholics obtained the repeal of the prohibition to perform public religious services in 1779, but were not fully emancipated.

It was this post-American revolutionary war England that met the oncoming French revolution and Napoleon. Long tradition of reform in both political and social affairs made Englishmen believe their system of constitutional government with some improvement would meet the needs and solve the problems. In addition, the Methodist led revivals affected all other denominations and the general Christian or Christianized

223 population brought stability in the face of the revolutionary activity that took place everywhere on the Continent. The British lower classes were more patient and law abiding and the upper classes felt their need for responsibility. Thus Great Britain saw no revolutionary activity in an age of revolution but instead a rising tide of reform came about.

None the less, Thomas Paine (1737-1809) proclaimed radical democratic ideas such as popular sovereignty and the abolition of the monarchy. His Rights of Man (1792) was directed against Edmund Burke (1729-97), whose conservative critique in the Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) had a powerful influence on England and Europe.

Parliament reacted against the events of the French revolution with what seemed to be a willful disregard of its constitutional background and seemed unresponsive to the needs of the people. The government suppressed dissenters and instituted the Six Acts in

December 1819. These acts forbade large meetings, raised fines for seditious libel, sped up trials for political agitators, increased newspaper taxes, prohibited the private training of armed groups, and allowed local officials to search suspected homes.

In the face of this debate and the problems of the age the granddaughter of George

III, Alexandrina Victoria, became queen of England from 1837 to 1901. Queen Victoria became a stabilizing force and a symbol for English Middle Class morality and propriety.

THE INDUSTRIAL AND AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTION

England became the “workshop of the world” on the basis of its capitalistic economy and attitude. However, there were domestic problems such as abuses of patronage, and an obsolete criminal justice system. But like a tide that lifts everything up in its wake,

224 the Industrial Revolution affected everyone in society positively by bringing new jobs and goods and creating and recreating the infrastructure of cities. In the countryside, the consolidation of scattered landholdings and the improved rotation of crops raised the yields of the fields. However, a shortage of food developed because of a population increase, especially in the cities between 1750 and 1820 from 7.8 million to 14.3 million.

Machines, industrial cities and wage labor reduced the importance of crafts, small cities and the agricultural sector. New methods of road construction improved transportation and traffic. The export of industrial products strengthened the British position in world trade.

Politically, the government was in the hands of William Pitt, the Younger, from 1783 to 1806. He was 24 years old when he first became Prime Minister. The state suffered under the burden of debts incurred during the American Revolutionary war. In 1785 there was a reduction of all duties between England and Ireland. But in 1791 Wolfe Tone

(1763-98) founded the United Ireland Society that sought an alliance with France and in

1798 launched a swiftly defeated rebellion. These events led in 1801 to the Act of Union that joined Ireland to the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

Pertaining to the British Empire, Canada was reorganized in 1791. To accommodate the French settlers, Canada was organized into French-speaking Lower Canada or

Quebec and English Upper Canada. Australia was begun with Sydney, known then as

Botany Bay, in 1788 with a settlement of British emigrants who were initially convicts.

India was brought under the control of Parliament and the British government in the

Regulating Act of 1773 and the East India Act of 1784. Prior to this the British East

225 India Company had administered India. Queen Victoria became the Empress of India in

1877.

Pitt’s greatest achievement was his leadership in the British struggle against the

French Revolution and Napoleon. Britain continually thwarted Napoleon’s plans. From

1798 to 1799 they defeated him in the Egyptian campaign. In 1801, Napoleon’s plan to take over India was abandoned as the British defeated the French efforts on the eastern coast of India. In 1802 the British obstructed the French plan for the creation of a

Caribbean empire which was to gain adherence to the United States. In 1803 Napoleon conceded this plan by selling the Louisiana Territory to the United States. From 1804 to

1805 the British thwarted Napoleon’s plans to conquer south-eastern Australia and his intentions to invade the British Isles were given up as well. From 1807 to 1808 a second

French plan to obtain India failed because of the reluctance of Tsar Alexander I to back

Napoleon. From 1812 to1814 it was Napoleon’s hope that the United States would defeat Britain in their War of 1812. Instead it ended without any results of consequence.

THE INDUSTRIALIZATION OF ENGLAND

Economic and social conditions changed during the 18th century so that the preconditions for the Industrial Revolution were created. The French socialist Blanqui in

1838 and Friedrich Engels in 1845 introduced the term “Industrial Revolution.” A number of factors contingent on each other brought it about. Calvinist ethics had helped to bring out a new conception of work ever since the Test Act (1673) had barred those outside the Anglican confession from political life. Diligence, frugality and the sober striving for profits beyond the satisfaction of individual needs had created “private

226 capital” for investment in the expansion of productive capacities in large-scale enterprises. Limitations on private enterprise practically disappeared during the 18th century.

Adam Smith and David Ricardo (1772-1823) laid the theoretical foundations of

“Capitalism” and the classical school of economics that conceived of economic

“Liberalism” as proceeding from the basic factors of labor, and the striving for personal profits and liberty. Economic liberalism found its most convinced advocates in the

“Manchester School,” a group of textile manufacturers that gathered around Richard

Cobden (1804-65). Francis Bacon’s view that empirical knowledge applied in observation and experimentation increases wealth was widely spread by English

Enlightenment thought. Thus the sciences found their practical application.

Yet also, craftsmen without formal education accomplished basic technical innovations: the flying shuttle – Kay (1733); the coking process in the production of iron

– Darby (1735); the steam engine – Watt (1775); the “Mule Jenny” – Crompton (1779); the power driven loom – Cartwright (1786). In 1789 the propulsion of a manufacturing machine by a power-engine brought about the beginning of the mechanization of work and thus the Industrial Revolution. Economically, Britain had from 1707 the largest

European free trade area with an established system of financial credits (the Bank of

England begun in 1694), active coastal traffic, a strong fleet and a profitable trade.

The wealth of capital brought about an “Agrarian Revolution” with the redistribution of open fields, dispossession of small farmers, enclosures of common lands by large aristocratic landowners aided by Parliamentary acts. Rising yields of grain and early breakthroughs in medicine (hygiene and the fight against contagious disease) led to a

227 sudden increase of population. Over population became a problem and a subject of study by the economist Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834). He considered the privation and misery of the masses to be the consequence of natural law, because he thought, population increases geometrically, whereas yields of grain increase only arithmetically.

Emigration to North America, Australia and New Zealand, flight from the countryside and the development of the proletariat (the industrial working class) in the big cities were consequences of this over population.

The “Factory System” stimulated the new growth in industry. This required self- confident initiative, capital for machines and raw materials, a labor supply and markets for goods mass- produced by machines. New classes and titles came out at all levels of society. Entrepreneurs were owners of private capital. Proletarians were the unskilled working class people who worked the machines. Both of these groups were opposed to the gentry and the large old style merchants. At the same time, they were opposed to each other. An over-supply of workers and cruel measures such as long 12 to 14 hour work days at starvation wages and female and child labor brought about the new, still unfamiliar toil, of factory labor. The starvation wages justified Ricardo’s theory of the

“Iron Law of Wages,” that holds that labor and its products underlie the same law of supply and demand – thus the more laborers and unemployed there are the lower the wages will fall until they are at a subsistent level. This is especially true if labor class families have more and more children who then enter the work force. To put it another way, the rich will get richer and the poor poorer as long as there are too many people to replace already poor workers who are fired, get sick, hurt, or die.

228 Favorable conditions for industrialization were found in the processing of cotton in the Manchester, Lancashire area of central England. Spinning mills after 1790 and weaving mills after 1815 called for relatively little initial capital and secured high profits because of an already established “triangular” trade cycle. This Triangular trade called for the transport of slaves (1807 this trade was abolished by Parliament) to American cotton plantations, the import of the raw cotton to Britain, and the export of cotton goods to Africa and the plantation countries or colonies. Imports rose between 1785 and 1840 from 11 million pounds to 366 million pounds. The Continental System of Napoleon led to the establishment of new markets for the textile industry in South America and India.

The enormous gains in capital laid the foundations for the new capital-intensive mining and heavy industries. These industries advanced because of the revolution in transportation through the steamship invented by Robert Fulton (1765-1815) in 1807 and the railways and the “locomotive” invented by George Stephenson (1781-1848) in 1814.

In 1830 the first railway was opened from Liverpool to Manchester. By 1848 the British rail system extended to over 5,000 miles.

The consequences of the industrial revolution were many. To the end of the 19th century, England remained the leading industrial nation. Following the English model, but with their own variations, other European industrial states developed in Belgium,

Holland, Switzerland, France after 1825, Germany after 1850, and Sweden after 1880.

Industrialization led to the concentrations of people and resources in industrial areas or urbanization. Industrialization also led to the development of democratic class societies, the raising of national incomes and the general standard of living and the establishment of world markets. This industrial revolution and the technological civilization that has

229 grown up with it have not ceased. The crafts and the small peasantry were reduced in importance. Class differences intensified and the social question became the most urgent problem of the industrial nations.

THE VICTORIAN ERA 1832-1901

Landmark legislation in the Reform Bill of 1832 extended the voting rights to many in the middle class and in the cities. It ended the rotten boroughs by changing the voting districts so that there could be representation in the growing city districts that had no representation before. But the bill did not extend to the lower working class.

The slave trade was abolished in 1807 and the emancipation of slaves within the

British Empire in 1833. The Factory Act of 1833 stemmed the tide of “White Slavery” or

“Yorkshire Slavery” and began the reform of the harsh working conditions and the pay.

The length of the workday was brought down from 18 hours to 12 hours. And there were now limitations placed on child labor. The Chartists became the first working man’s lobby whose purpose was to secure representation from lower and middle working classes. Their program was 1) universal suffrage, or the right of every man at the right age to vote, 2) secret ballots, 3) no property qualifications for members of parliament, 4) adequate salaries for members of Parliament, and 5) annual elections. As a package this legislative program failed to pass but in piecemeal fashion all the above items were in place by the end of the century.

From 1815 to 1843 the upper middle class and the landed gentry united to obtain their goals which were to dominate and exclude the lower classes. This was called the

Victorian Compromise. Manchester liberalism limited the tasks of the state to the

230 protection of the laws and internal security. Central and municipal administration, the bureaucracy, the police and the postal services were modernized. In 1840, Sir Rowland

Hill introduced the postage stamp, the postcard and parcel post.

Under Henry John Temple, Lord Palmerston, the Prime Minister from 1855 to 1865,

Britain supported liberal democratic forces in Italy, Denmark and Poland. And apart from the Crimean War (1850-53) and the Sepoy Rebellion in India there was an extended period of peace throughout the world called the “Pax Britannica.”

In 1851 the first World’s Fair was held in Hyde Park at London’s Crystal Palace.

This was an exhibition of British industry and might and it symbolized Britain’s preeminence in the world. As the industrial revolution raised the standard of living it broadened the middle class temper of society and lessened class conflicts. Movements motivated by Christian and moral considerations supported reform programs in political unions, administration of the Poor Laws and penal institutions, public health and factory regulations, anti-pollution laws, sanitation reforms, parole reforms for prisoners, juvenile delinquency help, and the establishment of a welfare ministry. These reform movements helped reduce the workday from 12 to 10 hours and helped produce a Public Health Act that organized local units for aid.

After 1850 aristocratic political parties gave way to real democratic parties with mass membership. These parties were led by leading political figures such as Benjamin

Disraeli (1804-1881) and William Ewart Gladstone (1809-98). Disraeli became a defender of the monarchial institution and led the Conservative Party with his program of

“Tory democracy.” Gladstone emerged as a liberal reformer who stressed domestic, fiscal and administrative reforms. In 1867 the 2nd Reform Bill enfranchised the lower

231 middle class and the skilled workers. Gladstone was the beneficiary of the bill as he was elected Prime Minister three times, 1868-74; 1880-86; 1892-1898. Disraeli was Prime

Minister from 1874 to 1880. During Disraeli’s second cabinet he initiated his imperial policies described below. Domestically, the suffragettes under Emmeline Pankhurst

(1858-1928) demonstrated for the emancipation of women and female suffrage.

IRELAND

The “Irish Question” or problem was about the Irish establishing their own home rule and independence from Britain. Emigrants to the United States founded a secret society known as the Fenians in 1858 to establish an autonomous Irish republic. Without much success, Gladstone passed the 1869 Disestablishment of the Irish and Land Acts to aid

Irish renters and to counteract terrorism and peasant unrest. Using legal means, the Irish representatives in Parliament under Charles Stewart Parnell (1846-91) tried to work for home rule. To this end they formed the Irish Land League in 1879. They used passive resistance against Captain Boycott, an English land agent, whose name became synonymous with this kind of resistance. In 1886 Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill divided the Liberal Party and brought about the fall of his Cabinet. His Home Rule Bill for 1893 had his party’s general support. The United Irish League continued the struggle for freedom in 1900. A national uprising was prepared by the Sinn Fein, or the “Ourselves

Alone” Party, founded in 1905, even though the Land Act of 1903 had given the right to

Irish renters to own land. The Conservatives, Protestant Ulster, the House of Lords, and the army opposed the Home Rule Act of 1912. The danger of civil war was concealed solely by the outbreak of World War I. After World War I fighting between Irish groups

232 and British troops did take place until an uneasy peace was settled by treaty. Ireland finally became independent after World War II in 1949, but Northern Ireland remained part of Great Britain.

QUESTIONS: 1. How did the Industrial Revolution work for the good and the bad of society? 2. How did the agricultural revolution also change things? 3. What did

Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus believe about society, economics, and population? 4. Describe the Victorian era, the individual leaders and what did they do? 5. What was the Irish problem and how was it solved?

FURTHER READING:

Paul Johnson. The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830. New York:

HarperCollins Publishers, 1991.

David W. Bebbington. The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and

Moody. Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2005.

233 IMPERIALISM

Gary K. Pranger

Imperialism comes from the Latin that means “the power of command.” Western

European nations continued the colonial policies of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries after

1880 by competing with one another in the economic and political partition of the world.

The balance of power and the wealth and power of Western European nations over the whole world were to be determined by intense rivalries. As the 19th century advanced two types of colonies developed. “Settlement Colonies” were established by emigrants who left their homes for religious or political reasons, or because war and overpopulation threatened their economic survival. “Commercial Colonies” were foreign bases with trading concessions and were used as sources of raw materials as in India and Africa.

The beneficiaries were private trading companies or chartered companies that appealed to the Western European State government for protection of their interests. Over time these simple trading posts became larger possessions until the private company needed more and more help from the state government. Eventually that nation took it over as its own political and economic entity. This could mean taking over a whole region as in South

Africa or a part of a city such as in Shanghai.

The formation of colonial empires or economic spheres of interest had a variety of causes. A rapid economic rise took place in capitalist-industrializing states such as the

United States, Great Britain, Germany followed by France and Japan. Italy and Russia developed more slowly. Technical and social advances in electricity and chemical production; transportation and communication advances in the telegraph and telephone created the preconditions for a world -wide trade and economy. Ever increasing capital

234 investments for new methods of production and large urban construction projects, railways, canals, and harbors altered the older economic structures. The fusion of companies into larger enterprises created monopoly capitalism. “Cartels” developed which agreed to limit production and fix prices along with “syndicates” that joined marketing organizations to influence the market. Thus “Trusts” attempted to control the market through monopoly. Since the Renaissance in the 15th century banking institutions had been developing and financing private and government projects but never on the vast scale as in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Thus the infrastructure of the Western European nations and cities improved and with it the economic and social stature of the common middle class and working class people. The ability to buy an ever increasing array of consumer goods made Europeans and Americans have an appetite that only encouraged more and more adventurism on the part of trading companies and merchants around the world. Economic problems such as the international competition over raw materials, markets and capital investments became political problems. Thus, “colonies” were possessed in greater degrees and developed as an answer to these problems.

Colonies were meant to help the mother country become economically self- sufficient. This meant a protection from world-wide competition and economic crises through the opening of new sources of raw materials for the mother country’s use and thus preserving its standard of living. Overpopulation was thought to be a problem and so colonies could serve as a place of emigration. Thus, it was thought that economic and colonial expansion were demanded for the sake of sustaining a nation. Also, Western

European nations and their colonies utilized protective tariffs or what could be called

235 neo-mercantilism in order to keep rival countries out of their market place so the mother country’s merchants and manufacturers would always benefit.

IMPERIALISM IN AN INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT

As we will see four things led to World War I (1914-1918): 1) Nationalism, 2)

Imperialism, 3) Militarism and 4) Rationalism. Rationalism is a belief in atheism and a self-confidence in a human centered society. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) taught that since God is dead, man must act for himself. Feodor Dostoevski (1821-81) had said, “If there is no God all is permitted.” William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) had said, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. The trouble is there is no centre.” God died because evolution became the ruling philosophy and worldview that mankind desired very much to accept. But everywhere thinking men understood that without God individuals and nations were prone to violence and self-destructive paths even when that was not the intention.

Imperialism is an effect caused by “nationalism.” As realistic power politics brought national unification to Italy and Germany, this gave many to believe only great powers and those with the will to possess power could carry out the struggle for existence. These great powers were fit for rule over “inferior” (colored) peoples that created a heightened racism. There was a “sense of mission” according to which the white race, the nation or the larger ethnic unit (as in Panslavism, or Pan-Germanism) were called to Europeanize, civilize, and improve the rest of the world. This was the incorporation of Nietzsche’s ideas and Social Darwinism, a social application of Charles Darwin’s scientific theory, into intellectual, social, cultural and political circles prior to World War I. As mother

236 nations served to protect their interests the desire for power increased. “Militarism” was thought to be necessary and beneficial. National prestige and scope were based on the use of power and the ability to fight a war. Therefore, an armaments race became necessary. This meant the construction of naval vessels because control of the seas meant control of the world as taught by Alfred Thayer Mahan in his book The Influence of Sea Power (1890), a very influential book. All of this came to define the word imperialism. Much of the political history up until World War I is a story of an arms race amongst European nations, but in particular Great Britain, Germany, Japan and the

United States. Militarism became a way of life in the nationalism of many countries and a hobby to leaders and attending generals that went beyond World War I and effectively created the grounds for World War II.

Thus “Imperialism” was supported by the military, the economic interests, the upper and lower classes and to a large extent the better off skilled workers. Imperialism spread

Western civilization, that is, religion, morals, ideology, intellectual ideas, customs and fashions around the world. Imperialism developed infrastructures, that is, railways, administrations, harbors, colleges, schools, hospitals, and churches. Imperialism developed the economies of the colonies, that is, plantations, industries, and markets by exploiting the colonial peoples as cheap labor or exterminating them in colonial atrocities, and in many cases, destroying their traditions as in India and in China.

For the colonial peoples, imperialism developed new needs and also resentment and feelings of hatred or inferiority that led to an awakening among these so called “colored” nations. This awakening could be in the form of religiously inspired revitalization movements, or, to the discovery of their own native history that developed a national

237 consciousness. From the late 1800’s until World War II there were struggles for emancipation from this imperialism in all these colonies.

THE BRITISH EMPIRE 1814 to 1914

After the prohibition of the slave trade in 1807, the interest in African colonies lessened. In 1865 Britain went so far as to consider giving them up altogether.

Commerce and industry sought markets in South America, India and China. The largely incidental new acquisitions served to safeguard the trade lanes at sea. Singapore was acquired in 1819, the Falkland Islands in 1833 and Aden in 1839. New markets opened in Singapore and Hong Kong in 1841. After the loss of New England to receive British immigrants and convicts, Cape Colony was developed after 1806, the Straits Settlements along the Malaysian coast and Singapore after 1824, Western Australia after 1829 and

New Zealand after 1814.

“Progressives” in Parliament entertained propositions of self-administration for the

“white” settlement colonies. Canada became a 1st Dominion in 1867 and received complete political autonomy by the North American Act.

The increase in population, the flight of people from agrarian areas and urbanization continued. Despite increased competition by the USA, Germany and Japan, Britain continued to adhere to the principle of free trade. By 1880 British shipping made up 46% of the world-wide tonnage and had by 1913 doubled its foreign trade with an unfavorable balance of active trade but a favorable balance of passive trade owing to international banking and insurance business earnings. Investment capital in the empire increased and

238 British leadership in the world market was secured by the further development of imperial institutions.

The British had a strong sense of “mission” influenced by its Puritan Christian heritage that was intertwined with the conviction of an obligation to promote progress and civilization in the world, and economic and power-political interests. Thomas

Carlyle (1795-1881) justified the British mission in the world and called England the chosen nation. Sir Charles Dilke (1843-1911) conceived the image of a “Greater Britain” in 1868 in a “world that was growing more English every day.” Robert Seeley (1834-

1895) called for a planned expansion of Great Britain in 1883. Rudyard Kipling (1865-

1936) proclaimed the “white man’s burden” and the mission of Britain. Collectively this

“mission” became known as “imperialism” and it encompassed all classes and was propagated by associations, journals and books.

In 1872 Benjamin Disraeli, in his Crystal Palace speech, attacked the indifference of the liberals and Gladstone in colonial matters. To secure the sea route to India, he purchased the Egyptian Suez Canal shares in 1875. In 1877 Queen Victoria was now the

Empress of India and she supported Disraeli’s policies. In 1878 Disraeli’s government acquired Cyprus. In 1882 the British occupied Egypt and it remained a British protectorate until after 1945.

Africa became the subject of a race for partition by many European nations. British imperialism gained direction and purpose as a result of the Cape-to-Cairo plan. Slowly

Britain gained all the parts of Africa that would allow it to build a railroad from Cairo to

Capetown. Thus, Britain entered the Sudan and encountered the Mahdi – a self- proclaimed prophet of Islam who attracted opponents against colonialism but in the end

239 Sudan came into the fold in 1899. Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) gained a monopoly over the gold and diamond fields of South Africa and with it all the surrounding territory.

Rhodesia was obtained by 1891, Somalialand by 1884, Uganda by 1895, Kenya by 1886, and the Sudan by 1899. From 1890 to 1896 Rhodes became Prime Minister of Cape

Colony. The Boer War was fought from 1899 to 1902 in order to defeat the Boers or the

Dutch immigrant community and secure the colony for Britain. However, the Boers were granted self-administration and Dutch was made the official language until 1923 when

Afrikaans became the official language.

As of 1914 Britain was the colonial master over Egypt, Sudan, Nigeria, Uganda,

British East Africa (Kenya), British Somaliland, Rhodesia (Zambia & Rhodesia),

Bechuanaland (Botswana) and South Africa. France colonized Morocco, Algeria,

Tunisia, French West Africa, Senegal, Ivory Coast, French Equatorial Africa, and

Madagascar. Germany colonized Togo, Cameroon, German East Africa (Tanzania),

German Southwest Africa (Namibia). Italy held Libya, Eritrea, Italian Somaliland and in the 1920’s would hold Ethiopia. Portugal held Cabinda, and Mozambique. Belgium held the Belgian Congo (Zaire or Republic of the Congo). Spain held Tangier (part of

Morocco) and Rio De Oro (Western Sahara) and Rio Mun.

BRITAIN IN ASIA

From 1858 to 1947 Britain ruled all of India. However, some 562 semi-independent princely states were governed indirectly. Britain ruled in matters of defense and foreign policy and the Viceroy of India was the “governor general” who represented the crown in its relations with the princely states. In 1859 all people and castes were made equal

240 before the law. Legislation prevented brutal punishments and the perverted aspects of family law –such as the self- immolation of widows in the deceased husband’s cremation fire. Infanticide, child marriage, the revenge of murderers and ritualistic stranglers were now illegal.

The infrastructure of India was improved by the building of roads, a canal system and railroads. From 1949, India possessed the largest state-owned railway system in the world. The English language became the official language in 1835, thus giving India’s multi-ethnic communities a way to communicate. Dravidians in the south and Aryans in the north were given a common and international tongue.

However, imperialism had negative effects on Indian culture. The new system of law undermined Hindu clan, village and family customs. The introduction of police weakened the authority of the village elder. Tying India to the world market helped destroy the economic independence of the village. The demand for high taxes in cash and not in barter also upset the self-sufficiency of the village system. A system of absentee landlords destroyed India’s ancient landholding system. In ancient times the amount of taxes became elastic. Only one tenth was taken. In 1793 the British transformed the “zeminder” or tax collector into a landlord who could charge peasants any price he wished and forced them into bankruptcy. 49% of the land was controlled by this system. Also, Great Britain imported manufactured cloth into India that was considerably cheaper than the domestic handicrafts. This and other measures kept India an agricultural nation and a closed market for industrial goods though Britain did much to industrialize India. Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1947), in his use of passive resistance and civil disobedience, succeeded in thwarting the above policies and in the gaining of India’s

241 independence in 1947. Soon after it’s independence colonial India would be divided into India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka (1948) and still later Bangladesh (1971).

In another form of imperialism and colonialism, Britain along with the United States,

France, the Netherlands, Germany, Russia and Japan forced open trade with China.

Britain used diplomacy, the illegal trade of opium, war, and political pressure to force

China to make concessions and gain minor acquisitions. In 1842 Hong Kong Island was acquired and the new territories “leased” in a treaty until 1997. Treaty provisions were made for the opening of five other ports to British trade.

The British East India Company acquired Burma in 1824 that was put under the administration of India in 1897. Malaysia and Singapore were together called British

Malaya or the Straits Settlements and brought into the colonial fold by Sir Stamford

Raffles by 1824. The Dutch had possessed Malaya from 1641. Before this the

Portuguese held it from 1511 but Raffles traded a portion of Sumatra for Malaya. Hence, the Dutch possessed all of “Indonesia” and the British colonized “Malaya.” Singapore was originally an uninhabited island bought by Raffles from the Sultan of Johore in 1819.

It became very prosperous as the island strategically controlled the Malacca Strait and the eastern approach to the Indian Ocean.

Britain still retains colonial ties over Gibraltar, the Leeward Islands, Anguilla, the

Cayman Islands, the Turks and Calcos Islands in the British West Indies. It retains

Bermuda, the Falkland Islands, British Antarctic Territory, South Sandwich Islands, St.

Helena, Tristan da Cunha, and Ascension in the South Atlantic. In the British Indian

Ocean Territory formerly embracing islands that were dependencies of Mauritius, or

Seychelles, are the Chagos Archipelago including Deigo Garcia, Aldabra, Farquhar, and

242 Des Roches. Britain also possessed Pitcairn Island in the Pacific Ocean half way between Australia and South America.

Beyond the British holdings, the Asian colonial picture looked like this: The

Netherlands colonized Indonesia; that is the entire archipelago from Sumatra and Java to

Borneo, the Celebes and New Guinea. France held French Indochina that would one day be Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos. The French also had colonial outposts in China in

Shanghai and within the Indian empire in Yanaon, Pondichery, and Karikal at Britain’s allowance. Portugal held colonial outposts in Macao adjacent to Hong Kong in China and in India the cities of Diu, and Goa. In Indonesia they held one half of the island of

Timor. Spain controlled the Philippine Islands until 1898 when the United States took over. Japan held Formosa (Taiwan) from 1898, Korea and one half of Sakhalin Island formerly part of Russia from 1905. Russia held the city of Port Arthur or Dalien today in

China until 1905 when Japan took over. Germany held the city of Qingdao and the

Caroline Islands in the South Pacific Ocean.

Imperialism could also mean that one nation maintained a political and

economic pressure on certain areas to make a certain land or entity conform or

agree to its policies. In the Middle East the break up of the Ottoman Empire by

the end of World War I (1914-1918) meant that Turkey became independent.

However, the French and British held “mandates” over a number of areas that

were more than mere influences but not fully colonialism. Boundaries of modern

day Middle Eastern countries were created by the imperialist powers. The French

held Syria, and the British held Palestine, Trans-Jordan and Iraq as mandates.

Then there were the “influences,” meaning political and economic persuasion to

243 go along with the policies of a particular European nation. Up to World War I

and 1914 Russia influenced Iran but after 1914 Britain and the United States

influenced Iran. Also, Britain influenced Afghanistan.

The era of imperialism and colonialism in all its ways existed up until the end of

World War II in 1945. Afterward each colonial entity gained its own independence and national freedom except for very small holdings.

From 1885 to 1914 Britain pursued a general policy of “splendid isolation.”

That is the enforcement, consolidation and expansion of its colonial holdings against the efforts of France and Germany in Africa and Russia in Asia. Secretary of Colonial

Affairs Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914) became a dominant figure from 1893 to 1903 as he attempted to stem the danger of competition for the British Empire by expansion into unoccupied areas. Naval armaments were brought to a level of superiority over the two next strongest naval powers Germany and Japan. Moreover, the empire restricted free trade in favor of an imperial federation of “white” colonies united by the Crown with a common language and economic privileges. Dominion status was granted to the

Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, New Zealand and Newfoundland in 1907, and the

Union of South Africa in 1910. To facilitate transportation, Britain reached a compromise with the United States over the Panama canal question.

QUESTIONS: 1. What does imperialism mean? 2. Define Imperialism,

Nationalism, Militarism and Rationalism and tell how they are related. 3. How did

European nations colonize the rest of the world? For what reasons? Was this justified? 4. How did Great Britain become the “British Empire.” 5. What

244 happened to the colonial world after World War II? 6. Are there still regions of the world that struggle with imperialism, nationalism, militarism, and rationalism?

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING:

John A. Garraty and Peter Gay, Editors. The Columbia History of the World. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, (1981) Eighth Edition, 1987.

Donald Kagan, The Western Heritage. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson/Prentice Hall, Inc., 2004.

The Anchor Atlas of World History. Volume II. Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978.

245 RUSSIA: IT’S ORIGIN TO 1914

Gary K. Pranger and Alan Repko

This piece is meant to summarize Russia’s main themes, ideas and people up to 1914 and World War I. There are four major themes here: 1) the founding and expansion of the Russian Empire, 2) the impact of Western ideas on Russia, 3) the rise of a revolutionary intelligentsia – that is an educated elite, and 4) the worsening peasant situation.

Slavic tribes began migrating into Russia from the West in the 5th century A.D.

However, it is thought that “Scythians” and other central Asian peoples also migrated from the Middle East and Asia. Scandinavian chieftains or Vikings established the first

Russian State in the 9th century around Kiev and Novgorod. Slavic people from southern and eastern Europe made up most of the people that they ruled. In the 13th century the

Mongols overran the country. The Mongols gave to the Russian mix an Asiatic component that later made the conception of the Tsar much more than just a king with a kingdom – it was an empire with an emperor. Russia recovered under the grand dukes and princes of Moscovy, or Moscow, and by 1480 freed itself from the Mongols. Ivan the Terrible was the first person to formally be proclaimed “Tsar” or “Czar” (Caesar) in

1547.

Peter the Great (Peter I 1682-1725) extended the domain and, in 1721, founded the

Russian Empire. Peter I began to adopt Western European ideas, such as shipbuilding and many aspects of court life. Western ideas and the beginnings of modernization spread through this huge empire by the 19th and 20th centuries. But political evolution

246 failed to keep pace. In essence, the Russian Empire remained static politically from the time of Peter the Great until the last Czar, Nicholas II, was deposed in 1917.

THE RISE OF RUSSIA

Peter I, or the Great, came to the throne at the age of seventeen and became known as the “master craftsman on the throne.” As he Europeanized Russia with despotic energy he said, “Russians must be coerced!” His travels abroad (1697-8 & 1716-17) reflected admiration for the “Germans,” a term he used collectively for all foreigners. The Czar himself was personally trained as a gunnery expert in Konigsberg, a shipbuilder in

Amsterdam, and a navigator in London. He fought and won the Great Northern War against Sweden gaining access to the open sea for Russia or a “window on Europe” and he built the city of St. Petersburg.

In the forty- year period that came between the death of Peter the Great and the beginning of Catherine the Great, there were a series of weak and ineffectual rulers.

These czars “ruled” over the people instead of “governing” them. As a result statesmanship was slipshod and there was no real domestic policy. The nobility gradually increased their power and privileges and they were not concerned with unifying behind the czar. Moreover, the peasant masses made up 90% of the Russian people and they were increasingly oppressed.

Peter III, Catherine’s husband, was an incompetent ruler, and he went insane toward the end of his very short reign. The situation became so terrible that Catherine intrigued with her palace guard and had her husband deposed and put to death in 1762.

247 Catherine, The Great, (1762-1796) was a very strong-willed German woman who kept the interests of the Russian state uppermost in her mind. Growing up in Germany,

Catherine had been greatly influenced by the ideas of the French Enlightenment. She corresponded with Voltaire and even gave generous financial support to Diderot and the

Encyclopedia.

Catherine was exposed to five features of the French Enlightenment: 1) the belief in progress, 2) the primacy of reason, 3) the effectiveness of good laws, 4) the essential goodness of human nature, and 5) the strength of the human will. Enlightenment thinkers taught both rulers and common people that by “self-determination” one could get what one wanted. For the rulers this newer notion become mixed up with the ancient notion that the ruler must become firm and inflexible in order to get anything done. Catherine indicated that she did not want slavery for her people but “obedience to the law.”

Unfortunately, Catherine’s reign, which began in a spirit of liberal rationalism and optimism, ended in reaction and oppression.

There are three reasons why her reign accomplished so little in the way of implementing Enlightenment ideas. First, for 17 of her 34 years as Czarina, Catherine and Russia were at war. Foreign policy diverted her attention and energies away from

Russia’s domestic problems. These problems were centered on the peasant problem and

Russia’s feudal, agrarian, economic system. Serfdom was still common. Serfs had few rights and owed almost everything to the nobility who were the primary landowning class. Peasant uprisings were a common feature of Russian history before, during and after Catherine’s reign. During Nicholas I’s reign later there were 556 peasant uprisings.

For all European peasants and serfs from ancient through medieval times the “riot” was

248 usually the only recourse to getting the attention of the ruling classes when they had problems with government. As the peasant problem worsened Russia’s economy became mired in stagnation while England experienced the first industrial revolution in Europe.

Secondly, Catherine was interested only in the cultural aspects of the French

Enlightenment; that is music, poetry, painting and, of course, French wine. She was not interested in the political aspects of the Enlightenment. Thus the upper classes became more French and European in education thus making the gap wider between the nobility and the uneducated peasantry who remained the most Russian in cultural beliefs, traditions, and religion.

Thirdly, Catherine’s interest in the Enlightenment did not extend to the Russian peasant masses. A peasant revolt threatened her life early in her reign, and, thus, she extended serfdom into areas it had not existed before, such as in the Ukraine. The

Ukraine was the “breadbasket” of the Russian Empire where the most fertile farmland existed. Under serfdom the peasant became a slave. These peasants were oppressed and exploited by their landlords and they possessed no civil rights whatever. They could be bought and sold and families could be broken up. This was similar to the institution of slavery in the United States at the same time. Catherine personally aided the enserfment of the peasants by giving gifts of land to her favorite nobles and, in some cases, to her numerous lovers. Therefore, a contradiction arose between the brutal reality of serfdom and Catherine’s devotion to the refined ideas of the Enlightenment.

In 1790, Alexander Radishchev, a leading noble, perceived this contradiction and published his famous book, A Journey From St. Petersburg to Moscow. This book was the first important literary account to portray the suffering of the peasant masses.

249 Moreover, it revealed the extent to which Enlightenment social ideas had penetrated the consciousness of the educated nobility. This educated nobility had copied the salon life of the European Enlightenment as they read, and spoke French, German, and English in their conversations. However, few of these intellectuals arose to challenge the system.

The majority became nothing more than party animals.

Catherine reacted negatively to its publication and branded the book as treasonous.

She sentenced Radishchev to death but later generously commuted his sentence to permanent exile in Siberia. Western political and social ideas were not welcome in

Russia. The treatment of Radishchev’s book by the government indicated that other writers could not easily find an outlet for their ideas or frustrations. Consequently, by

1825 Russian authors experimented with subtle approaches or used illegal means.

By 1800 it was not clear what impact Western ideas were going to have on Russia.

Radishchev seemed like a voice crying in the wilderness as few were eager to criticize the institution of serfdom or government politics. By the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century the monarchy was absolute and absolutely insensitive to the plight of the peasant masses. However, by the early 1800’s, a younger generation of educated nobility started to take Enlightenment ideas more seriously. The Czar saw them as being treasonous and hence continued to oppose any liberalization of political and social institutions. From this time those who wished Russia to incorporate Western ideas became known as “Westernizers.” Those who were opposed and wished Russia to remain purely Russian in all things were called “Slavophiles.”

After Catherine died, Paul I briefly reigned from 1796-1801. Paul was apparently

Catherine’s son. It is questioned by both the mother and son because of the former’s

250 numerous lovers. In any case, he began the struggle against Napoleon. Paul I hated his mother and tried to undo all that Catherine had achieved. He was unstable, incompetent, despotic, and perverse. A mutual hatred developed between him and his immediate advisors as well as with the nobility. A plot to kill Paul was planned by his enemies with the full knowledge and complicity of his son, Alexander. Success brought Alexander I to the throne from 1801 to 1825.

Alexander I, like Catherine, initially wanted to give his people peace and happiness.

He entertained major reforms including freeing the serfs and granting a liberal constitution. Then through insincerity, negligence, and leaving all affairs to conservative ministers none of the reforms came to reality. The great struggle against France and

Napoleon consumed most of his time. Napoleon defeated the Austrians and the Russians at the Battle of Austerlitz in 1805 and defeated the Russians again in 1807 at the Battle of

Friedland. After these two defeats, Alexander reconsidered his foreign policy and changed its course.

From 1807-1812, Alexander allied himself with Napoleon against England primarily, but also against Austria and Prussia. Alexander thought that it would be easier to join

Napoleon than fight against him. He believed that he and Napoleon could divide and conquer the world. Hence, Alexander attacked Sweden and acquired what is now

Finland. He declared war on the weakened Ottoman Empire (Turkey & Southeastern

Europe) and acquired the rich provinces of Besarabia and Baku. Baku is the source of much of Russia’s oil.

However, Russian and French economic and political aspirations became increasingly opposed to each other. Tension increased at the failure of an alliance treaty

251 between Russia and France that was to be strengthened through a marriage between

Napoleon and one of Alexander’s sisters. Napoleon really wanted to control all of

Europe and he could not do so with this last continental threat left to itself. Besides he had defeated Russia twice already.

Napoleon crossed the Russian frontier in 1812 hoping to crush Russian resistance in one mighty stroke. However, Russian forces retreated and fought utilizing a frustrating guerilla warfare. When Napoleon’s forces captured Moscow he hoped to end this resistance. However, the Czar simply retreated. Again Napoleon was frustrated as the

Russians burned Moscow along with food and weapons he might use. This time

Napoleon was forced to retreat; at first in an orderly manner but by the time his forces reached the border of what is now Poland most of his army was lost and in disarray. The harsh winter and the continued guerilla tactics defeated the French.

For the Russians the War of 1712 over Napoleon was a great patriotic struggle and described in Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. It was not the generals or Russian statesmen who were the heroes but rather the Russian people and winter. Moreover, the young

Russian officers of the army learned much about Europe and its ideas when they occupied France while helping the other nations to defeat Napoleon. They learned the essentials of the Enlightenment: rationalism, or the belief in reason, the concept of natural law, liberalism or the drawing up a constitution, democracy and representative government. As these young idealistic officers returned between 1815 and 1817 they began to expect big things from the Czar who you’ll remember had been idealistic and liberal minded at the beginning of his reign.

252 For ten years the young officers, intellectuals and other reforming groups tried to establish some kind of constitutional government and to abolish serfdom. They infiltrated key institutions like the army and government bureaucracy and tried to use

“reason” to quietly transform things. Still patriotic and concerned for Russia’s welfare, their greatest hope was for a fair and equitable constitutional monarchy like that of

England. They wanted to avoid the worst elements of the English situation; the rise of ugly industrial cities, slums and massive poverty while making Russia agriculturally and industrially more productive. They did not wish enmity with the Czar. However, if this plan did not work they saw the possibility that the Czar might have to be removed. They were optimistic that they could transform public morality and opinion and mold it to

Russian culture.

These young officers and intellectuals also had great respect for Russian native institutions – especially the “peasant commune,” an institution they were hoping to found the new Russia on. Communes were not something set up by the Bohevik or radical

Communists after the Revolution in 1917; they were an ancient institution in Russia. The commune was made up of anywhere 15 to 2,000 peasants – living in one community.

The commune owned the land, determined who was going to work what field as well as decide all other issues of life – all in a democratic way. The only exceptions to the rule were that the peasant owned his own house and farming implements.

As time passed these young officers and those in sympathy with them grew impatient and thought about revolution. Ironically, they did not want the peasants to take part in the revolution with them. They were still elitist and also too vague about how to gain their desired goals. When Alexander I died (of natural causes) and Nicholas I (1825-

253 1855) was about to be enthroned these young officers and a small group of soldiers revolted in St. Petersburg in December of 1825. This became known in Russian history as the Decembrist Revolt. They demanded a constitution from Nicholas but were put down after a fight. 500 soldiers were caught and imprisoned while some were sent into exile or hung. The rest of the army quickly backed Nicholas I.

The first result of the Decembrist Revolt in 1825 was that most of the radical leaders in Russia were removed. Secondly, by the fact that army officers had led a revolt made

Nicholas I keep tighter control of the army. Nicholas I became more conservative not less. Thirdly, the revolutionary movement now moved from the army barracks into the universities, behind closed doors and into literary circles. Fourthly, all who desired to reform or modernize Russia would be forced to take illegal methods in underground movements.

Nicholas I maintained what he believed to be the traditional Czarist autocracy. In order to do this he became an even more oppressive monarch. He improved the secret police and used heavy- handed censorship on all books and pamphlets. Nicholas made the suppression of freedom of thought and expression a continual way of life.

Ironically, it was during this heavy-handed reign of Nicholas I that Russia literature came to the forefront of world literature. Novels, short stories, and essays became the vehicles for the expression of opinion, for criticism, and for the opposition to vent their feelings in veiled symbolism and not merely for entertainment. A common theme was the social evil of serfdom. Hence this literature was sympathetic to the peasant masses in the tradition of Radishchev. These writers craved social justice and political liberty for the Russian people and they were hostile to oppression of all kinds. These literary works

254 were in great demand and were passed from hand to hand, much the same as Bibles were passed from hand to hand later in the 20th century Soviet Union. The actual criticism of the regime was often very subtly implied and often escaped the bureaucratic censors while the informed readers in the public at large understood the messages very well.

This literature helped individuals form their views of Russian society. It helped to express the collective desires of the Russian educated elite, to mold political parties and to define political, social and economic goals and programs.

In foreign policy, Nicholas I pursued a policy of aggression toward the Balkans,

Greece, the Ottoman Empire, and the Black Sea region that he did not yet possess.

However, he maintained a defensive policeman like policy of keeping the rest of Europe from liberal revolution in the widespread revolutions of 1830 and 1848.

Russia hoped to take advantage of the weakened Ottoman Empire and take the straits of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles so Russia could have an outlet from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean Sea. Moreover, Nicholas I hoped to dominate or incorporate

Bulgaria and Romania as well as to consolidate the areas held by Russia around the Black

Sea. Unfortunately, Austria also wanted to expand southward. These conflicting interests made for what was known as the “Eastern Question” in diplomatic circles.

England wanted to keep Russia out of the Mediterranean and away from her own colonial possessions in the Mediterranean and away from Iran, the Suez and Egypt. Great Britain felt threatened by the possibility that Russia might challenge her dominance of the seas and the trade that went with it. Therefore, to Great Britain to maintain the weakened

Ottoman Empire or the “sick man of Europe” was vital to the balance of power.

255 At the same time Nicholas viewed himself as being the protector of the legitimate rulers and old fashioned monarchism and therefore viewed himself as being the chief guardian of stability against liberal revolution in Europe. Moreover, Nicholas felt this to be his Christian duty. The Czar was especially close to Prince Klemens von Metternich

(1773-1859) of Austria, who was a devout Catholic and upholder of monarchy.

Metternich was Austria’s foreign minister and one of Europe’s great statesmen, and the last real believer in monarchism with Nicholas. Otherwise, most European leaders feared

Nicholas because he was so powerful and his army so large.

In 1848 a series of revolutions swept over Europe. Metternich was forced to flee

Austria. Liberal regimes were attempted in Germany, France, Hungary, and Italy.

Nicholas sent Russian armies into Hungary and crushed revolution there. He helped the

Habsburgs regain control of Austria. Nicholas put pressure on the Prussian king not to yield to liberal pressure. As a result of his intervention and threats of intervention all the revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe failed.

CHRISTIAN WOMEN, FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE INVOLVED

IN CHRISTIAN MISSIONS AND CRIMEAN WAR

Theodor Fliedner (1800-1864) and his wife Friederike (1800-1842) started the

“deaconess” movement that offered women roles as caregivers in Protestant churches and missions. Fliedner had been involved in a prison ministry to women. When these reformed women, along with others responded to Christ’s unconditional love they become involved in ministries to the poor. Women were seen to serve as compassion and caregivers. Fliedner established the Deaconess Institute or the “mother house” to train

256 women in a variety of skills that they could utilize in church and charitable work and as hospital nurses in Holland in 1836. Throughout Europe, mother houses were founded by many others and here unmarried women lived in community in vows of obedience, discipleship and devotion to Christ and their calling.

Elizabeth Fry (1780-1845) had been an evangelical minister in the Society of Friends who visited the women prisoners in London’s Newgate prison. There she read the Bible and prayed with them and supplied them with adequate clothes. She then began campaigning for better conditions and became part of the prison reform movement. She visited the Deaconess Institute in 1840 and founded her own Institute of Nursing in 1841.

It was here that Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) came in 1849 and 1851 to train for ministry. She had a deep personal faith in Christ and was the granddaughter of a reformer in the committed Christian movement known as the Clapham sect who encouraged her to take up nursing. During the Crimean War (1854-56) she reorganized the way English military hospitals were run. Thus, along with the German emphasis on trained workers and a devotion to duty, Nightengale helped spawn modern nursing.

THE CRIMEAN WAR

From 1848 to 1854 Nicholas I became overbearing and proud of his role as policeman of Europe. He thought he could refocus his attention on taking more land from the Ottoman Empire without interference. However, England and France became alarmed and believed it was time to stop Russian expansion. Hence, in 1854, Great

Britain, France, and the Italian States went to war against Russia. The war took place on a peninsula of land jutting out into the Black Sea called the Crimea, hence the name – the

257 Crimean War. It was a very limited war in size but it was very costly for all the participants as none distinguished themselves. Casualties on both sides were staggering.

The Crimean War was the first major conflict that occurred in Europe since 1815.

Moreover, Austria surprised everyone by its decision to remain neutral throughout the first part of the war. When Austria did come into the conflict it came in against Russia.

Remember that Russia and Austria had been allies up until this time. This turnabout would have tremendous consequences later on because it marked the beginning of the hostility between Austria-Hungary and Russia that would be one of the main causes of

World War I in 1914. It is also significant that Russia lost the war while fighting on her own land. By this it became apparent to everyone in Russia, including moderate elements that the Russian State was very backward and in need of drastic reforms.

Reforms would come after Nicholas I died and his son Alexander II (1855-1881) came to power. This czar is remembered for freeing the serfs. With the abolition of serfdom, village communes replaced the landlord in terms of authority over the peasant.

Much land was owned communally and not individually as in the West. Reforms were instituted also in the judicial system with Western European legal systems being introduced. This made the law system in Russia a little more fair, efficient and less corrupt. Reforms took place in the army with serf-peasant recruitment being reduced from 25 years to 6 years by 1874. All males had to serve in the military after the age of

20 and army discipline became less brutal than it had in the past. However, in all of this

Alexander II was not a popular ruler as he could be indecisive and rather closed minded to new ideas. A threat on his life in 1866 made him revert back to the methods of a

258 police state. In 1881 he was assassinated when a bomb was thrown under his carriage by a member of the “People’s Will,” a group dedicated to the overthrow of the monarchy.

Alexander III (1881-1894) became more brutal and repressive. He sought to roll back the reforms of Alexander II and make Russia become more “traditional.” He strengthened the secret police and increased press censorship as he favored a highly centralized bureaucracy.

His son, Nicholas II (1894-1918) was a much weaker and inefficient ruler. He would find out that the Russian autocracy could not endure the modernizing rigors of the 20th century. Hence, the Russian Empire remained static politically from the time of Peter the

Great until the last Czar, Nicholas II, was deposed in 1917 and he and his family killed in

1918. The hereditary monarchy ended when a communist regime took power in 1918.

QUESTIONS: 1) What are the main themes of Russian history? 2) Who are the important people and what did they think or do? 3) How did Russia’s historical causes create the effects of a later Soviet Union?

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING:

David Mackenzie & Michael Curran. A History of Russia, the Soviet Union and Beyond. Fifth Edition. Belmont, California: West/Wadsworth: An International Thomson Publishing Company, 1999.

Donald Kagan. The Western Heritage. 8th Edition. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 2003.

The Anchor Atlas of World History. Volumes 1 & 2. Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1974.

259 ROMANTICISM

BEETHOVEN: THE MAN AND HIS MUSIC

Gretchen Ervin

Ludwig von Beethoven (1770-1827) towers as a giant in the history of music. His works stand as eloquent testimony to an era of revolution – the birth of hope for liberty for the human spirit – and its bitter defeat. Beethoven was the first composer to be affected by the hope and tragedy of the French Revolution. He remained devoted all his life to a democratic ideal; the ideal of liberty, equality, and universal brotherhood.

Beethoven was born in mid-December 1770 in the old German city of Bonn. Both his father and grandfather were employed as musicians for the Elector of Cologne, who had his residence in Bonn. The young Beethoven demonstrated his musical genius quite early. He received lessons on the piano, organ and violin. He gave his first public concert at age eight. By his tenth birthday he was organist for his church. At age 13, he was appointed second court organist to the Elector.

The young composer became restless and contemplated a move to Vienna. He traveled there in 1787, where he met Mozart, but had to return home because of the illness of his mother. In 1792, he returned to Austria to stay. During the first months, he received lessons from the aging composer Franz Joseph Haydn (1732—1809). The

1790’s saw Beethoven’s first burst of creative activity. He composed music for piano, violin, cello and also his first symphony. A good example of his early work is his Piano

Sonata Op. 13, otherwise known as the “Pathetique.”

Beethoven saw his passionate love of freedom as being fulfilled in the French

Revolution. He idealized Napoleon as a hero who would lead humanity into a new age.

260 When he wrote his Third Symphony, Beethoven entitled it “Bonaparte.” However, when news reached the composer that Napoleon had crowned himself emperor, Beethoven angrily changed the dedication to the “Heroic Spirit of Man.” The symphony is still known today as the “Eroica.” Its first movement is very appropriate as a salute to a hero, whether Napoleon, or the totality of man’s spirit.

As early as the 1790’s, Beethoven had begun to experience the first signs of a malady fearful to any musician – deafness. In 1802, the year of the composition of his

Third Symphony, he was experiencing deep mental anguish at this increasing disability.

An eloquent expression of his distress can be found in a document now known as the

“Heiligenstadt Testament,” named after the small Austrian village where he was in residence at the time. This paper was destined for the eyes of his brothers after his death.

In it Beethoven wrote:

I must live like an exile; if I approach near to people a hot terror seizes me, a fear that I may be subjected to the danger of letting my condition be observed. Thus, it has been during the last half year which I spent in the country…. What a humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard the shepherd singing and again I heard nothing –such incidents brought me to the verge of despair; but little more and I would have put an end to my life. Only art it was that withheld me, it seemed impossible to leave the world and all I felt called upon to produce….O, Providence, grant me at last but one day of pure joy – it is so long since real joy echoed in my heart.

An expression of Beethoven’s mental state at this time can be found in the second movement of the Third Symphony.

Beethoven’s only opera, Fidelio, again dealt with the themes of liberty and justice.

The story is set in Spain, and tells of a cruel governor who has wrongly imprisoned his enemy, Floristan. Floristan’s wife, Leonore, suspecting which prison her husband is in, disguises herself as a man, and using the name Fidelio, is hired as assistant to the head of

261 the prison. She then tries to find her husband among those held captive. As a final measure, she begs the jailer to permit the prisoners to come out into the garden to get some air. As the men struggle into the light, they sing a chorus that can be called the greatest of hymns to liberty yet composed. It expresses Beethoven’s indictment of man’s inhumanity to man and his hope for a better world. The words are:

O, what joy to draw breath In the free air O, what joy Here alone is life The cell is a tomb… We will build with Confidence on God’s help; Hope whispers softly… That we shall be free, We shall find rest.”

On November 20, 1805, the first performance of Fidelio was given in Vienna.

However, instead of an audience of Beethoven’s friends and admirers, the theater was filled with French army officers. The army of his former hero, Napoleon, had invaded

Vienna the week before. The French officers did not take kindly to the subject of the opera and it was years before Fidelio received its due recognition. The years following the debut of Fidelio were filled with frustration and grief. Beethoven became the guardian for his brother’s son, Karl, a boy who presented him with endless tribulation and who could succeed at nothing, including suicide.

By 1818, Beethoven was completely deaf. It is however, a sign of his genius that some of his best work was yet to come. On May 7, 1824, his monumental Ninth

Symphony was performed for the first time. The audience was enthusiastic, and after the stirring second movement, warmly applauded. This interruption of the music produced a

262 poignant moment, for Beethoven could not hear this salute to his music. One of the performers had to turn him toward the audience so that he at least could see the tribute.

The characteristic that makes the Ninth Symphony different from all others, is

Beethoven’s departure from a major rule of symphonic form. Before his work, all symphonies were entirely instrumental; however, Beethoven introduced a choral fourth movement. For the text of the chorus, Beethoven used Schiller’s Ode to Joy, stressing the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God. The text begins:

Joy, bright spark of divinity Daughter of Elysium Fire-inspired we tread Thy Sanctuary Thy magic power re-unites All that custom had divided, All men become brothers Under the sway of thy gentle wings

With his Ninth Symphony, Beethoven lifted his prophetic gaze far beyond his time. He envisioned a new social order where hatred and strife would be no more and men would be physically and spiritually free.

Beethoven’s last years were filled with pain. He suffered a variety of ailments and finally, after experiencing surgery for the fourth time, died on March 26, 1827. All

Europe mourned his passing, and over 30,000 people attended his funeral.

There have been no definite references to his religious beliefs. He made no open statements concerning the Church, but some inferences can be made from his music.

During his last years, Beethoven composed the Mass in D Major, otherwise known as the

Missa Solemnis. One need not listen very long to this work before realizing that here is a deep statement of faith from a man who had suffered much.

263 Another clue we have is found in a letter written by his doctor. Evidently, Beethoven spent some time before his death reading the works of Handel, particularly the Messiah.

In the words of the doctor:

No words of comfort could brace him up, and when I promised him alleviation of his sufferings with the coming of the vitalizing weather of spring, he answered with a smile, “My day’s work is finished. If there were a physician could help me his name should be called Wonderful.”

QUESTIONS: 1.Discuss Beethoven’s view of the French Revolution. 2. Describe Beethoven’s changing attitudes toward Napoleon. 3. What is the significance of the Heiligenstadt Testament? 4. What is the significance of Fidelio? 5. What is the significance of the Third Symphony? 6. What is significant in the Ninth Symphony?

FURTHER READING:

Arnold, Denis and Fortune, Nigel. The Beethoven Reader. New York: W.W. Norton

& Co., Inc., 1971.

Abraham, Gerald, ed. The New Oxford History of Music Vol. VIII: The Age of

Beethoven 1790-1830. London: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Brunschwig, Henri. Enlightenment and Romanticism in Eighteenth Century Prussia.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974.

Reardon, Bernard M. G. Religion in the Age of Romanticism: Studies in Early

Nineteenth Century Thought. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

264 THE ENLIGHTENMENT & ROMANTICISM

QUESTIONS: 1) How did the Enlightenment come about? 2) What was Rousseau’s thinking vs. Voltaire and the Enlightenment? 3) Were there other views in opposition to the Romantic view of nature? 4) What did Goethe believe? 5) How did Coleridge and Wordsworth view nature and what did they do to capture their ideals? 6) Identify and describe the various romantic painters and how they saw nature and did their paintings.

FURTHER READING:

Kenneth Clark. Civilization: A Personal View. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.

Paul Johnson. The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830. New York:

HarperCollins Publishers, 1991.

Paul Johnson. Intellectuals. New York: Harper/Collins Publishers, 1988.

265 AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH ROMANTICISM WORDSWORTH AND COLERIDGE

CARL HAMILTON

In 1798 the anonymous publication of a thin volume of 24 poems called the Lyrical

Ballads marked the beginning of the “Romantic Movement” in England. The anonymous edition was so well received that a signed second edition written by William Wordsworth appeared in 1800. The preface to the 1800 edition constituted one of the most famous pieces of literary criticism in English and it became the Manifesto of the English

Romantic movement. Primarily, Wordsworth and Coleridge were reacting against 18th

Century poetic diction, that is, the prescribed vocabulary and phraseology for verse which rejected as unpoetic many common words and phrases. They were also deeply concerned about more individual fulfillment. In the Preface, Wordsworth wrote:

The principle object, then, proposed in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life and to relate or describe them throughout as far as possible in selection of language really used by men and at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination whereby ordinary things could be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them truly, though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature chiefly as afar as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.

Wordsworth was also concerned with the essential character of the poet and with the nature and purpose of poetic expression itself. He removed the poet from the high and lofty pedestal upon which the neo-classical movement had placed him. The poet is a man speaking to men, a man, it is true, endowed with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature and a more comprehensive soul than are supposed to be common among mankind, nonetheless, still a man.

266 Concerning the nature of poetry itself, Wordsworth said, “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility.” This is the best contemporary definition for poetry. Concerning the purpose of poetry, Wordsworth said:

Its object is truth, not individual and local but general and operative, not standing upon external testimony but carried alive into the heart by passion, truth which is its own testimony, which gives competence and confidence to the tribunal to which it speaks and receives them from the same tribunal. Poetry is the image of man in nature.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge and Lines Written a Few Miles Above

Tintern Abbey by Wordsworth, both from the Lyrical Ballads, exemplify the artistry present in the early stages of the English Romantic movement. Byron, Shelley and especially Keats in his great odes developed this artistry.

A comprehensive definition of Romanticism is beyond the scope of this piece.

However, there are some concepts that do help structure one’s study of 19th Century

English Romanticism. A good way to approach this study is to consider the great changes from Enlightenment thinking to Romantic thinking in four clusters of 18th

Century ideas that resulted in the development of English Romanticism. Deism developed into pantheism; mechanism evolved into organism; urbanism developed into primitivism; and rationalism and empiricism evolved into transcendentalism.

As a result of these changes, early 19th Century literature became more romantic and manifested greater emphasis upon these principle characteristics of Romanticism: 1) a love of nature for its own sake; 2) emphasis upon the individual; 3) rebellion against established forms; 4) escape from the stark, present world into the more congenial world of imagination; 5) an emphasis on the supernatural; 6) love for and interest in the past, especially the Medieval past; 7) an emphasis upon adventure for its own sake; 8) an

267 emphasis on melancholy resulting from the inability to attain the Romantic ideal; 9 an emphasis on emotion and the value of emotion as a separate entity.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) was born the son of a well-to-do lawyer in the town of Cockermouth, Cumberland, in northwestern England. Life was pleasant in his

18th Century home. Its rear garden bordered on the beautiful Derwent River at a spot within sight of its tributary, the Cocker, flowing in a quarter mile upstream. After the death of his mother in 1778, he was sent to the grammar school at Hawkshead, near Lake

Windemere, about 30 miles away in Westmoreland. Here he found a kind and indulgent schoolmaster in William Taylor. He boarded with Dame Anne Tyson, whose house still stands in the village that has changed little since Wordsworth’s day. There the name

“William Wordworth” can be seen deeply cut into a portion of the wood from his school desk. When his father died in 1783, William and the other four children were placed under the guardianship of two uncles, Richard Wordsworth and Christopher

Crackenthorpe.

He was a normal boy, active in field sports, country games, skating in winter, fishing and boating in summer, hiking in all kinds of weather. His early life here in this beautiful region with its sleeping lakes and peaceful valleys, surrounded by low mountains, resulted in the two abiding influences on his life. One, he developed a complex and many-sided love of nature. Two, he gained a deep feeling for the worth and dignity of ordinary men; such as, the Westmoreland shepherds whose stone fences still enclose the valleys and extend over the mountains in every direction.

In 1787 when he was 17, Wordsworth left the hills and valleys of Westmoreland and entered St. John’s College, Cambridge. What he valued most there was the association

268 with people, as he stated in The Prelude. The Prelude is Wordworth’s intellectual autobiography and his longest complete poem. During the years 1787 to 1792, the poetry

Wordsworth wrote was almost entirely in the gentle, tripping, pedestrian couplets and the stylized diction of the 18th Century, even with circumlocution such as “thundering tube” for “gun” and other similar diction devices. Those poems expressed the conventional sentiments and stereotyped responses of the 18th Century. A good example of one of these poems is “An Evening Walk,” that was published between 1787 and 1789.

In 1797 great good fortune befell William Wordsworth when he became the daily companion of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), whom he met in Bristol in 1795.

1797 also marked the beginning of Wordsworth’s greatest decade, 1797 to 1807. The poetry for which Wordsworth is justly famous was, by and large, written during that decade. He wrote a great deal of poetry after that, but none as good as the poetry written during this period.

Before this time, although Wordsworth had possessed the sensibility of a poet, he lacked the intellectual framework and matrix of ideas necessary for great poetic utterance. Coleridge, with his grasp of philosophy, now supplied that need, though

Wordsworth did not always echo the ideas of Coleridge. The changes in Wordworth’s conceptions of man, God, and nature, show a marked affinity with the course of

Coleridge’s reading from Locke and Hartley, through Spinoza and Berkley to Kant.

Wordsworth and Coleridge drew chiefly from two sources for poetic techniques to free poetry from the stale ways of custom. The first utilized a direct manner, plain diction, and simple stanza forms from the popular ballads and Bishop Percey’s collection

269 of 1795. The second utilized the 18th Century forms, especially the blank verse of

Thompson, Young, and Cowper, who have sometimes been called “pre-Romantics.”

These poems had challenged the domination of the couplet.

In their youthful enthusiasm, Wordsworth and Coleridge first attempted to co-author single poems, but their differing habits of composition soon proved such collaboration to be unfruitful. In 1797, they planned to publish a volume of poems by both. When

Coleridge’s friend Joseph Cottle of Bristol printed it in 1798, a literary landmark was made. For this small thin volume, of which only four known copies exist, came to be the event that marks the high-tide of Romanticism in England.

To understand Wordsworth’s first distinctive poetry, which he produced between

1797 and 1802, and to prepare to understand his greater works, it is necessary to grasp a few pervasive ideas that are expressed again and again in these poems. The first is the idea of pantheism; the second, the inclination ethic; and third, the duty ethic. At this time, Wordsworth envisioned ultimate reality as a single mighty spirit that interfuses, interpenetrates, and encompasses everything in the universe and yet expands beyond it into infinity. Everything in nature is, therefore, alive and divine. To touch a leaf is to make contact with deity, an outer manifestation of the same deity that resides in part in man. This conception, known as pantheism, inevitably bestows great dignity upon human nature, always a great romantic objective. But a far greater experience than touching a leaf is for man to apprehend nature directly, and this is one of the things that

Wordsworth describes in Tintern Abbey:

And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more more deeply interfused,

270 Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.

Now this is religion based upon nature. This religion influenced Wordsworth in his earlier years and led to what he called an “inclination ethic.” That is, all that man has to do to be moral or to become moral, is to expose himself to the beauties of nature. From this contact with nature, man’s desires and inclinations would be molded into such a love for his fellow creatures that all his actions will become moral. Of course, this is not true and over time Wordsworth realized this. He moved from the strict inclination ethic to what he called a “duty ethic.” When the beauties of nature failed to impel man toward morality he must fall back upon a definite stated code of duty such as the traditional

Christian one which we must try to fulfill whether we have the inclination to do so at times or not. His Ode to Duty deals in some detail with his conception of the duty ethic.

In his later years, Wordsworth wrote many long poems. He was an inveterate writer of sonnets. He wrote collections called the Ecclesiastical Sonnets, the River Dudden

Sonnets, and many longer poetic works, most of which were never completed. He is best known, not for Tintern Abbey, or his Intimation Ode, but through some of his short nature lyrics such as To the Daisy, The Small Celandine, To Daffodils, The Cuckoo, or perhaps some of the Lucy poems. All of these are part of his important works.

After Robert Southey’s (1774-1843 – poet laureate 1813-43) death in 1843,

Wordsworth became poet laureate of Great Britain. In 1845, clad in an ill-fitting dress coat borrowed from a friend, he was presented at court to the young Queen Victoria.

After repeated sorrows in his last years, including his sister Dorothy’s mental debility and

271 the untimely deaths of his daughter Doro and of Hartley Coleridge, of whom he was very fond, Wordsworth died on April 23, 1850. He was buried in Glasmere Churchyard where his plain and unadorned grave, like those around it, is visited to this day by throngs from all over the world.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was educated at Christ’s Hospital in London, which was the name of a famous educational institution of the time. He had a brilliant academic career at Jesus College, Cambridge. He was prominent among the young radicals of the day. He was a convert to Unitarianism and was a Unitarian minister throughout most of his life. He fell hopelessly in love with Mary Evans and hopelessly in debt at the same time. And these things inspired him to enlist in the King’s Light

Dragoons under the alias of Silas Tompkin Comberback. His brothers bought his way out of the army, and although he did many foolish things, he never again enlisted in the

King's Light Dragoons. He became interested in Southey’s idealistic society that was called pantisocracy, and they planned to establish a community in Pennsylvania on the banks of the Susquehanna River, not because they knew anything about the banks of the

Susquehanna but because they liked the sound of the name. Luckily, the scheme fell through. Coleridge became engaged to Sarah Fricker and later married her, and Sarah led him a dog’s life as long as he lived.

In 1795, Coleridge met Wordsworth, and then in 1797 they began their fruitful association. Coleridge became addicted to laudanum, a form of opium, and remained so throughout most of his life. In 1816, he placed himself under the care of Dr. Gilman at

Highgate, and he spent the rest of his career there. As a famous lecturer, he gathered

272 about him eager disciples who were interested in poetry and philosophy. He was known as the “Oracle of Highgate.”

Famous as Coleridge is in English literature, he really only produced a small amount of poetry. He is famous for the Rime of the Ancient Mariner that appeared in the Lyrical

Ballads. He also produced Kubla Khan, the Christabel fragment, and three great odes,

Ode on the Departing Year, (1796); France: An Ode, (1798); and Dejection: An Ode

(1802).

Kubla Khan is a magnificent fragment that has always been enchanting. The story that Coleridge tells is that he had taken an anodyne, which is another name for opium, for a toothache and he had just been reading the travel book Purchas’s Pilgrimage and he fell asleep. A magnificent poem of some 300 lines came to him in a flash, complete, without any conscious effort on his part. When he awoke he got pencil and paper and began writing as furiously as he could. A man from a neighboring village came in, interrupted him, he lost his train of thought, and therefore Kubla Khan is still a magnificent fragment. My only response to that story is “baloney!” Coleridge was an inveterate liar about some things. The dates of his poems he jumbled to suit himself, and

Kubla Khan was not composed in the way Coleridge said it was. It probably was the beginning of a much larger work that Coleridge either lost interest in or that got beyond his artistic control. But here he demonstrated the power and the working of the imagination.

Coleridge’s critical writings are very important, but very difficult to read. His

Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, is one of the most important and, at the same

273 time, most unreadable tomes of literary criticism in existence. But it is important to students who do graduate work in English literature.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is probably the favorite Coleridge poem. Here we can read and analyze it.

It is an ancient Mariner, And he stoppeth one of three… The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone: He cannot choose but hear…

With sloping masts and dipping prow, As who pursued with yell and blow Still treads the shadow of his foe, And forward bends his head, The ship drove fast, loud roared that blast, And southward aye we fled.

And now there came both mist and snow, And it grew wondrous cold; And ice, mast-high, came floating by, As green as an emerald…

And a good south wind sprung up behind; The Albatross did follow, And everyday, for food or play, Came to the mariner’s hollo!

In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud, It perched for vespers nine; While all the night, through fog-smoke white, Glimmered the white Moon-shine.

God save thee, ancient Mariner! From the fiends, that plague thee thus! Why look’st thou so? With my cross-bow I shot the albatross.

The killing of the albatross may seem an unimportant act for us but in the context of the poem it is a crime against all of nature. The whole poem is designed according to a V outline. If you can visualize a V, the crime occurs at the top of the left- hand side of the

274 letter V. There is a successive downward alienation from nature, from God, and from his fellow men. Then at the bottom of the V is the turn, and then instead of alienation, there are upward reforming movements as the bonds that separated the Mariner from nature and his fellow men are broken.

All in a hot and copper sky, The bloody Sun, to noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the moon.

Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, everywhere, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, everywhere, Nor any drop to drink…

Alone, alone, all, all alone, Alone on a wide, wide sea! And never a saint took pity on My soul in agony.

The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand, thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I.

I looked upon the rotting sea, And drew my eyes away; I looked upon the rotting deck, And there the dead men lay…

Within the shadow of the ship I watched their rich attire: Blue, glossy green, and velvet black, They coiled and swam; and every track Was a flash of golden fire…

275 Shortly after this episode in the poem, the Ancient Mariner blesses the water snakes, and this marks the turning point of the poem. Before that, he had only been able to kill and to curse and he had not been able to pray. Then there is a turn in the poem, and the move is toward successive reconciliation – reconciliation with nature, in that it rains shortly thereafter. There is reconciliation with God; he prays God’s blessing upon the water snakes and upon all nature. There is reconciliation with man, with his emphasis upon the human family. And, of course, the Mariner himself periodically feels the necessity to tell his story to those who have in them a lack of love such as the lack that led the Ancient Mariner to kill the albatross and to alienate himself successively from nature, God, and from man.

Over the last part of his life Coleridge, like Wordsworth, became an evangelical

Christian who defended the faith against its detractors in many of his later writings. The stereotype of Coleridge as only a Unitarian and drug addict is misleading as he himself saw these as early choices of youthful rebellion. Unfortunately, literary scholars then and now conveniently forgot or left this part of his life out.

This journey through some of the wonders of English romanticism has been all too brief. However, I trust it has been enjoyable and I trust you will want to make some return visits to the Lake Country and its poetry in the future.

QUESTIONS: 1. What was the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge like?

2. What views of the world and real life conflicts did they bring into their work?

FURTHER READING:

Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: Norton, 2005.

Carl Woodring. Wordsworth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1965.

276

ENGLISH ROMANTIC POETS

Gretchen M. Ervin

With the publication of the Lyrical Ballads in 1798, the Romantic Movement in

England came into full flower. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were members of the first generation of English Romantics. Among the second generation were Lord Byron (George Gordon 1788-1824), Percy Shelley (1792-1822) and John

Keats (1795-1821) who wrote mainly during the second decade of the nineteenth century.

Byron’s father, “Mad Jack” Byron, was a spendthrift and a libertine. His first wife died leaving him with a daughter, Augusta. In 1785, he married his second wife,

Catherine Gordon, of Aberdeenshire, Scotland. The marriage was not a happy one. On one occasion “Mad Jack” wrote to his sister concerning his wife, “She is very amiable at a distance, but I defy you and all the apostles to live with her two months, for if anybody could live with her it was me.”

George Gordon Byron was born of this unhappy union on January 22, 1788. Byron’s father died when he was three years old and his mother raised him. She abused and indulged him in turn. He had a club- foot, probably the result of polio, and Katherine

Byron subjected her son to a series of painful quack treatments. When Byron was ten his great uncle died, leaving him heir to the title Lord Byron and the ancestral home of

Newstead Abbey, Nottinghamshire. Byron was educated at Harrow school and Trinity

College, Cambridge. His study habits, to say the least, were erratic. He read widely in many subjects, pursuing whatever topic intrigued him. He had few friends and took to gambling, often ending up in serious debt. In spite of his activities he received his degree

277 in 1808. Byron had published his first volume of poetry in 1807, entitled Hours of

Idleness. It was violently attacked by the critics, particularly those on the Edinburgh

Review. Byron, instead of voicing an immediate reaction, bided his time. He steeped himself in Pope’s brilliant satire The Dunciad. A year later he retaliated with his piece

English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, which hinted at his dangerous satiric powers. In the summer of 1809, Byron and a college friend named John Hobhouse left England on a trip that lasted two years. Together they traveled through Portugal, Spain, Malta, Albania,

Greece, and Turkey. When Byron returned to England he described his experiences in the poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. This poem demonstrated his Romantic preoccupation with foreign and exotic lands. Byron stated that he believed the virtues found among the Albanian outlaw bands were superior to those of European civilization.

He also expressed the belief that life was essentially painful.

Upon his return to England, Byron took his rightful place in the House of Lords. In

February, 1812, he made his first speech before that august body, making an impassioned plea in defense of the workers who were being replaced by machines. In another speech on behalf of Irish Catholics, Byron pointed out that the blacks had been freed but not the

Irish.

Byron was extremely popular in British society and was involved in many intrigues with fashionable women. All of his affairs paled, however, in contrast with his relationship with his half sister, Augusta. They had rarely met during their lives, and when they met in 1813 they were immediately attracted to each other. They entered into an incestuous relationship, and Augusta bore her half-brother a child. This act deeply

278 affected both of them as they were burdened with bitter guilt for the rest of their lives.

The theme of incest can be found in several of Byron’s later poems.

In an attempt to reform his own condition, Byron proposed marriage to Anne Isabella

Milbanke, a young lady of high character and good family. With some difficulty, he convinced her to agree; and they were married January 2, 1815. The union proved to be a disastrous mistake. Shortly after the birth of their child, Anne fled to her father’s house.

In April 1816, a deed of separation was signed. Shortly afterward, Byron left England never to return. He spent his self-imposed exile traveling through Europe. In

Switzerland he met Shelley, his wife Mary and Mary’s half sister, Clare Claremont, who was to give Byron his third child. In 1819 he met Contessa Teressa Guiccioli, the woman who was to be his inspiration for the remaining years of his life. Teresa had been married at 16 on the wishes of her family to a man more than 55 years older than her. She was attracted to the poet and ultimately left her husband to live with Byron.

Passionately devoted to the cause of freedom from oppression and dictatorship,

Byron went to Greece in 1823 to help in the fight against Turkish rule. While there he contracted malaria and died at Missolonghi on April 19, 1824.

One can summarize the character of Byron by saying that he was first and foremost a sensualist. He not only pursued pleasure with complete abandon, but was startlingly open and candid about his excesses. In spite of his ardent belief in liberty, Byron also believed that the general weight of historical evidence showed the futility of patriotic endeavors. Perhaps, some time in the future mankind might achieve a permanently secure independence, but nothing had yet happened to give hope.

Here we can only consider three of Byron’s representative pieces.

279 The Prisoner of Chillon was written in 1816. The poem was loosely based on the story of Francois de Bonnivard, a 16th Century Swiss politician and poet who was imprisoned during a period of religious persecution. In the poem, three brothers are imprisoned in the dungeon of the Chateau de Chillon. Many years pass, during which two of the brothers die and are buried beneath the dungeon floor. When rescuers finally arrive, the surviving brother no longer cares; his senses have been numbed.

It might be months, or years, or days I kept no count, I took no note, I had no hope my eyes to raise, And clear them of their dreary mote; At last men came to set me free; I ask’d not why, and reck’d not where; It was at length the same to me, Fetter’d or fetterless to be, I learned to love despair. And thus when they appeared at last, And all my bonds aside were cast, These heavy walls to me had grown A hermitage—and all my own And half I felt as they were come To tear me from a second home: With spiders I had friendship made, And watch’d them in their sullen trade, Had seen the mice by moonlight play, And why should I feel less than they? We were all inmates of one place, And I, the monarch of each race, Had power to kill—yet, strange to tell In quiet we had learned to dwell; My very chains and I grew friends, So much a long communion tends To make us what we are:--even I Regain’d my freedom with a sigh.

In the dramatic poem, Manfred, Byron touched upon his incestuous relationship with his sister. The main character is a typical Byronic hero who is a defiant melancholy

280 young man brooding on some mysterious, unrevealed, unforgiveable sin in his past, a man consumed by cosmic despair and engendered by contempt for mankind.

Byron’s masterpiece is usually considered to be the unfinished poem Don Juan.

Byron used a name familiar to his reading audience but gave his hero a new character.

The poem revealed Byron’s yearnings for beauty and innocence, the raptures and illusions of his loves, the sordidness of his baser indulgences, his knowledge of past history and present fads and fashions, his efforts on behalf of liberty, his disillusionments, his questionings of religious dogma, and his ridicule of the general pettiness of human life.

Percy Shelley was born August 4, 1792, into a well-to-do British family. He had a fairly happy childhood and did not show any change in temperament until he was sent away to school at Eton at age 10. There he rebelled against the cruel punishments and the dictatorial attitudes of his teachers and his older classmates. At one point he got so angry he blew up part of the school fence with gun powder. His only real friend at Eton was an old doctor by the name of Lind. Shelley read William Godwin’s book Political Justice.

Godwin’s thesis was that all institutions were to be hated and that man’s reason was the only basis for morality.

In 1810 Shelley went to Oxford. While there he and a friend, Thomas Hogg, developed a philosophy opposed to all conventional attitudes. They believed that the established church with its dogmas and faith in God was the basis for all that was wrong in England. Accordingly, the two friends wrote and published a pamphlet entitled “The

Necessity of Atheism.” Shelley and Hogg were summarily expelled from the university.

281 A year later Shelley married one of his sister’s school friends, Harriett Westbrook.

He was 19, she was 16. The marriage was not successful, mainly because Harriett was not an intellectual and could not participate in her husband’s many enthusiasms.

Some time in 1814, Shelley met William Godwin and his daughter, Mary. It was not long before Mary and the young poet had eloped. They went to Europe and lived together even though Shelley was still married to Harriett. Of course, this was all in accordance with William Godwin’s philosophy on the artificiality of marriage. They were married two years later but only out of fear of losing their two children to the

Napoleonic law code concerning women, children, and marriage.

The Shelleys spent their last two years in Italy. It was there that in 1822 Shelley and a friend were drowned at sea. Their bodies were burned on the shore in the tradition of the ancients. Lord Byron was in attendance at the rites.

Shelley’s literary career can be divided into three different periods, the first contained this earliest work and his most radical philosophy. During his school years he had steeped himself in the materialistic philosophers such as Epicurus, Lucretius,

Voltaire, Hume and Godwin. He reached a point where he even doubted the existence of

God and the divinity of Christ. To him the only true religion was the religion of philanthropy. Shelley believed that man must rid himself of the evils of institutions, such as government, law, private property and matrimony. As examples of this early period one could use his pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, and Queen Mab, a lengthy poem in which he struck out at orthodox Christianity and secular despotism. He proposed that nothing could be called true that was not received through the senses and that religion failed such a test.

282 The years 1814 to 1817 were a transitional period for Shelley. It was during this time that he left his first wife, who subsequently committed suicide, and married again. It was during these few years that he was metamorphosed from a materialistic reformer into a poet. This was in part due to his first real meeting with misfortune, anguish and repentance. The change in his views was not accomplished overnight but through a gradual evolution. At first an atheist, he came around to the Romantic notion of a creative spirit in nature. He wrote Essay on Christianity, which though still hostile to the church, it spoke with respect of Christ.

Shelley’s view of institutions began a change. He still regarded them as something to be destroyed but now only after man had become enlightened and refined. Revolution was to be bloodless and guided by men unselfish in their goals. Perhaps one of the best examples of his work in this period is the poem Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. Here he expressed his yearning for that ideal realm which as mortals we do not behold but the existence of which is manifested to us by the loveliness of those things that even in this life we may come to know.

Spirit of Beauty, that dost consecrate With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon Of human thought or form, where art thou gone? Why dost though pass away and leave our state, This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate? Ask why the sunlight not forever Weaves rainbows o’er yon mountain-river; Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown; Why fear and dream and death and birth Cast on the daylight of this earth Such gloom; why man has such a scope For love and hate, despondency and hope?

No voice from some sublimer world hath ever To sage or poet these responses given; Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven,

283 Remain the records of their vain endeavor— Frail spells, whose uttered charm might not avail to sever, From all we hear and all we see, Doubt, chance, and mutability. Thy light alone, like mist o’er mountains driven, Or music by the night wind sent Through strings of some still instrument, Or moonlight on a midnight stream, Gives grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream.

Almost all of Shelley’s best and most famous works were written during this last four years. The turning away from his earlier philosophy was more and more apparent.

He never became a Christian, but he spoke of Christ with reverence, as one whose mission was love and regeneration. He considered the Bible to be the head of the list of the world’s greatest literature. Nature was now inhabited by love and he looked for the ultimate triumph of good.

In 1820 Shelley wrote Prometheus Unbound, a lyrical drama in which he expressed with more intensity and breadth than anywhere else those conceptions upon which his hope of the future of mankind rested. He used the old Greek legend of Prometheus, the

God who offended Jupiter by giving the gift of fire to man. Jupiter had Prometheus chained to a rock where he was subjected to a series of agonizing tortures. At first

Prometheus cursed Jupiter. But through the long period of suffering, his attitude changed and he lost his hatred. Through this play Shelley attempted to open man’s eyes to the fact that he would never be free until he gave up his thirst for revenge and that evil was not an original aspect of nature but had been created by man’s will.

John Keats (1795-1821), of all the Romantic poets, had the most unpromising and humble origin. His father worked in a livery stable, an occupation that did not pay royally. Keats’ parents, in spite of their financial situation, dreamed of sending their son

284 to Harrow School. But circumstances were against them. Instead they sent him to a small private school outside London. At age 14, Keats was an orphan. At 16 he was apprenticed to a surgeon and druggist. He served four years as an apprentice and then studied at such hospitals as St. Thomas’s in London. Even though he was licensed as a druggist, in 1816 the young Keats became increasingly unhappy with his career. He grew more and more attracted to a literary career and late in 1816 abandoned medicine for good.

Through the help of Shelley and others, Keats managed to secure a publisher. In

March 1817, a small thin volume of his poems appeared but was almost completely ignored. In April 1818, he published Endymion, a long, allegorical poem. The critics immediately attacked it viciously in their reviews. Keats was undaunted by these attacks.

Instead he was remarkably open to what they had to say and was eager to learn everything he could from the experience. What the enemies of Keats did not know was that he was more conscious of his imperfections, more pained by them and more aware of their cause than anyone else. He knew that what he needed was still further study and meditation.

All of Keats’ best work was completed during the last two and one-half years of his life. This included odes, sonnets and the poem Hyperion.

During a trip to Scotland he contracted a sore throat which soon became chronic.

Not realizing the seriousness of his condition, he proposed marriage to a young woman named Fanny Brawn. Instead of an expected improvement, his condition deteriorated.

He traveled to Italy hoping to escape the threat of the English weather. His doctors had told him that he was suffering from a digestive disorder. However, they made a slight

285 error in diagnosis. Keats died in Rome on February 23, 1821 at age 25. An autopsy showed that he had suffered from tuberculosis and that both of his lungs had been almost completely destroyed.

The thoughts that Keats regarded as most precious had come to him not through philosophers but through poets, and the relations between poetry and truth and between poetry and life were to him a matter of the highest importance. He developed a true sense of the role of the poet in poetry. First, that poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts and appear almost as a remembrance. Second, its touches of beauty should never be halfway, thereby making the reader breathless instead of content. Third, if poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all.

Keats did not produce much poetry because of his tragically short life. However, critics agree that what he did produce is indeed worthy of remembrance. The forms that

Keats found to be most congenial for his talents were the sonnet and the ode. “Ode to a

Nightengale” is a superb example of his poetic skill.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: ‘Tis not thorough envy of thy happy lot But being too happy in thine happiness,-- That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

O for a draught of vintage! That hath been Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth, Tasting of Flora and the country green, Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth! O for a beaker full of the warm South,

286 Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, And purple-stained mouth; That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, And with thee fade away into the forest dim:

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale and spectre-thin and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs, Where Beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond tomorrow.

Perhaps the best way to summarize the influence of these three poets will be to consider their respective views of nature and conditions in this world. Byron was the archetype of his literary hero, a brooding, melancholy man, an idealist who could see nothing good in the present or possibility of such in the future, a man who could feel that pessimism and melancholy were the only experience of man. Shelley was not concerned with the poor conditions of the past or present, he looked to the future. His main theme was a condition of life that has not yet been brought to pass. Keats was a direct opposite of Byron in his disposition. He disliked gloom and despair, he did not look forward to any future Utopia; instead he found reality and delight in the present beauties of nature and art. His aim, more than anything else, was to make us feel more joyously than we have ever felt that this world of ours is full of beauty, the beauty of nature, of love, of art and poetry.

QUESTIONS: 1. Describe the poetry of Byron, Shelley and Keats and their differences? 2. What views of the world and their real life conflicts did they bring to their poetry? FURTHER READING: Byron, Shelley, and Keats

287 MUSIC OF THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

Evelyn Davis

Romantic music offers so many styles that everyone can find something to suit his or her own taste. Romanticism is the name given to a new stream of literature and the arts that dominated the 19th Century. It emerged from doubt, revolt, and social change in the

Enlightenment years, the 1700’s. Yet Romanticism is an element in art that has existed for many generations.

In the time of the Greeks, music first began to go in two different ways. Those who followed the god Apollo created music of an idealistic nature with clarity of form and the sweet-sounding lyre as the chief instrument. Followers of Dionysius, the god of wine, created sensuous, unrestrained music. The aulus with its shrill, piercing tones was their favorite instrument. From these early Greek cults have come the use of the terms

Apollonian and Dionysian to indicate respectively the two extremes of style: classical and romantic. Throughout history there have been alternations between these two polarities, but there is really no dichotomy between them. Both derive from a common source, that is, the vital human experience. Every age has contained expressions of art which reveal characteristics of classicism or romanticism. These two tendencies then are signposts revealing certain general trends with generous over-lappings and mixings of both characteristics. For example, one period such as the Renaissance (1500’s) stressed qualities that are classical, while in the Baroque period (1600’s) romantic qualities were stressed. However, it remained for the 19th century to be so dominated by so-called

Dionysian characteristics as to be labeled the Romantic Period.

288 The Enlightenment philosophes and an ultra-conservative aristocracy dominated the

18th Century and this became the age of “neo-classicism” because they styled themselves after classical Greece and Rome in ancient times. With the nobility of the old regime, the accent was on correct form rather than deep feeling, on the manner rather than the matter.

Music of the neo-classical period was objective, orderly, and it had clear-cut contours.

There was a tendency toward concentration in its formal structure; it was universal in its appeal, yet exclusive in its creation for an aristocratic audience.

Romantic music, on the other hand, was intensely subjective. When Rousseau declared, “I am different from all men I have seen; if I am not better, at least I am different,” he heralded the birth of a popular ego and personal creative self- consciousness. No longer did the environment rule man; rather, he tried to climb above it and recreate it. The pronoun “I” dominated. As a consequence, emotion was elevated above reason and romantic music became characterized by subjectivity.

Romantic music is open and loose in construction opposed to the closed form of classical construction. Picturesque, colorful treatment and shadowy contours contrasts with classicism’s clear cut contours. We find music that appeals primarily and strongly to the imagination and emotion. Mysticism, the exotic, fantasy, and oriental touches flavor romantic music.

Let us consider the social-cultural influences on music at this time. First, the revolutionary spirit of the age infused artists with the ideals of liberty and individualism.

Beethoven in the section above was greatly influenced in this way. As the revolutions opposed the 18th century status quo, so also music revolted against the classicism of the past. To be different was the goal and romantic composers tried a great variety of

289 musical experiments to achieve individualism. The expression of emotion and stimulation of the imagination became the primary goal for most of the romantic composers.

Second, the Industrial Revolution gave rise to a wealthy middle class who became the audience for composers. Music addressed the masses more than it ever had in the history of music before. While literature and the visual arts were quick to use the injustices of the Industrial Revolution as subjects for their work, music became more and more disassociated from real life.

Three, the business of music developed. In order to attract the patronage of this new public, the composer, together with his publisher and concert manager, had to sell music to his public. So we have many new publishing houses which were established.

While the revolutionary spirit originated in France with Paris as the kind of international center, it was really in Germany and Austria that musical romanticism flourished. Vienna in particular was the scene for much music-making in the 19th

Century. Franz Schubert (1797-1828), for instance, performed at home for his friends in informal parties. Other conditions helped the cause of music such as the increased ease of travel. Viennese, for example, used train- travel as a form of entertainment as well as a mode of transportation. They had better communications through the telegraph and the improved mail facilities. The rise of the daily newspaper and in it advertising and musical criticism became important. The large increase in printed books and music was important and so was the education of the masses. This all led to the development of an enormous new public, all eager to hear what music had to offer and to participate when they could by learning to play instruments and join in vocal music. With the good came

290 the bad. Art was too often commercialized and fell to a low level in many instances, particularly in the late 19th Century. Composers who catered to the public taste in striving to produce sensational effects often wrote vulgar and mediocre music that was a disgrace to the art. These works were not part of the large body of favorites that we enjoy today.

Now let us consider some of the functions of music. Music still served the aristocracy, but of course there were fewer patrons now. However, there were no opportunities for the kind of patronage that Haydn had enjoyed under his benefactor

Prince Esterhazy, for example. The intimacy of the small salon was still the ideal setting for chamber music and solo performances. Musicians were the featured performers as romantic music was much too difficult for the amateurs to play. In addition to the aristocracy, the middle-class listener became the new patron. These people were searching for new excitement and relaxation from the routine of living. Symphonic music, the opera and ballet were types of music that appealed to these middle class patrons. These types of musical performances needed public halls and so concert halls and opera houses were constructed in greater number. The old Gewandhaus Concert Hall in Leipzig where Felix Mendelssohn (1729-86) often conducted a very fine orchestra was developed from an old warehouse. Over time very beautiful and elaborate halls for concerts were built.

The 19th Century gave rise to the importance of the virtuoso performer. Performers and composers sought to impress their audience. Some composers were also very fine performers themselves, so they wrote music that was calculated to dazzle the public that they wanted to impress when they performed. Other wonderfully gifted artists

291 interpreted the works of the great masters in an impressiveness that had been unknown before this time. They had pianists like Frederic Chopin (1810-49), Franz Liszt (1811-

86), Mendelssohn, Anton Rubinstein (1829-94) in Europe; and in America we had our own Louis Gottschalk (1829-69). There were violinists like Niccolo Paganini (1782-

1840), who had such a marvelous technical skill. Singers such as, Jenny Lind, often called the “Swedish Nightingale,” toured the United States in 1847 under P.T. Barnum’s management and made a considerable impression.

The press was quick to point out the idiosyncrasies of this new breed of performers and caricatures of famous musicians became very popular. Cartoonists made out Liszt to have large hands and exaggerated movements. Another favorite target was Hector

Berlioz (1803-69). Because the romantic composer wrote to express his personal feelings, he also wrote some music without a present audience in mind. This was indeed art for art’s sake or music for some projected audience of the future.

Another function of music was social dancing. This was the craze all over Europe and thus was created a large market for dance music. The popularity of the waltz made

Johann Strauss (1825-99) famous and wealthy.

The church, which had been the oldest patron of music, could no longer be considered one in this period. Most of what little sacred music was written was much more appropriate for the concert hall than the church.

The teaching of music became an established profession in this time. Many fine conservatories and schools were founded. Composers wrote music especially for their students.

292 In analyzing the characteristics of the 19th Century style we find two broad categories. First there is the romantic idealist. These were the men who wrote absolute music. They insisted that music must exist for its own sake. And on the other hand, you have the romantic realists; these men championed program music. Now many composers saw in music a means of describing or illustrating objects, situations, and emotional states. So music became a medium for them in which to tell stories or to paint pictures.

We see here some of the influence of literature. This led to much experimenting with sound in order to make music realistic. Thus program music became a unique development of the 19th Century.

Size is an important thing to consider. We have two extremes. The earlier “form” mentioned above was freer. We might even say that form was abandoned in this period, because compositions became large and long or small and very short. For example

Schubert’s Symphony in C Major, twice the size of the average (Franz Joseph) Haydn

(1732-1809) symphony when played without cuts, is typical. Conversely, we find short works that do nothing more than convey a momentary state of feeling. The short preludes of Chopin and many piano pieces called “moment musicals,” songs without words, fall into this category. We also find many short pieces in one movement, or a loose bundle of short pieces written for orchestra.

Opera underwent a change in the 19th Century. We find an entirely new type of subject matter. Opera now becomes concerned with the magical, the exotic and fantastic.

Instrumental music takes on an entirely new dress. The Industrial Revolution produced musical instruments with greater technical precision and standardization. The new valve mechanism in brass instruments, for example, made possible the production of new

293 sounds that had never been played before. Thus, we find many new orchestral effects, richer harmonies, more freedom in key relationships, and greater attention to the sheer sound of music. In fact, this concern for sheer sound is the one characteristic that unites all composers of the 19th Century. This period was one of many contradictions and contrasts. But in spite of the diversities of expression, the sound of music itself was of supreme importance to all composers. You may recall that classical composers did not care what musical instruments were used to play a given melody. Voice and instruments were often interchanged in Baroque musical writing, but Romantic composers wrote with very specific instruments in mind, and tone color was important, and no substitutes were allowed.

Another trait of this period was the composers’ attitude towards nature. Haydn’s

Creation and The Seasons had descriptive touches such as the cock crowing; rain and tempests, but these were simply attempts to copy nature. Romantic composers, on the other hand, projected their own emotional world onto their visions of landscapes. In Carl

Weber’s (1786-1826) opera, Der Freischutz, for example; he felt and created “soul” images of the dark forest in sound, not only countless trees of the forest, but also the wind, the forest’s friendliness and its mystery and also the way in which it influenced the people inhabiting it. This made Weber’s music very powerful and suggestive.

Mendelssohn sought to give impressions of landscapes. In his Italian and Scotch symphonies he succeeded in bringing to the listener’s mind the impression of characteristics of local color that is suggested in Italian and Scottish scenery. For example, Mendelssohn visited Fingal’s cave in 1829. An overture came to him in its full form and color while he was tossing about in a small boat within the cave. And before

294 that wonderful day was over, he had written to his sister Fanny, “That you may understand how extraordinary the Hebrides affected me…the following came to my mind there,” and he sent her 21 measures that were the opening of the overture to this piece.

Musicology, the systematic study of the history, science, methods and forms of music, was a child of the Romantic Movement and began in Germany during this time.

Germans loved and respected the great deeds of the past, and Mendelssohn’s discovery and first performance in 1829 of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion is an outcome of this romantic attitude toward historical research. Musicians rediscovered the biographical works on Mozert and Handel and reproduced them. Musicians wrote about life too and their essays became a means of releasing some of their artistic nervous hypertension.

Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner and many others wrote essays. Robert Schumann started his own newspaper as an outlet for his ideas. Professional musical journalism and criticism also had an increasing importance in the 19th Century.

The rise of nationalism involved the use of folk music, rhythms, and legends of particular nations and source material for compositions.

The piano came into the spotlight in this century. It was changed, too. A cast iron frame replaced the older wooden frame. The cost of manufacturing a piano was reduced and it stayed in tune much longer. This made it easier to be shipped for traveling virtuosos. The piano became not only popular as an accompaniment instrument for the new German lieder but also was in demand as a solo instrument. The piano virtually became a musical symbol of the Romantic spirit of freedom and individualism with

Chopin as its great exponent.

295 Altogether there was a different approach to all the fine arts in this period. Painting, poetry, and music were kept as separate arts in the 18th Century. However, during the

19th Century we find a mixture of these various arts. Poets tried to make their poetry musical, painters were more concerned with tone color, and composers tried to make music poetical and picturesque. As a result we find a creation of new kinds of songs that could not have existed in previous times. The new romantic idea of the marriage of poetry and music was the esthetic basis. Songs before the time of Schubert kept poetry and music entirely separate. Before this time, to some soberly recited verses a tune was added and a thin unrelated accompaniment tried to join music and words together in a loose, superficial way. But Romantic song is entirely different. Poetry, vocal music, and accompaniment are so thoroughly fitted together that each factor adds to the whole. The words interpret the music, and the music reflects a deeper meaning and mood of the words. And so we have the famous German lieder coming out as one of the outstanding results of music development in this time. It was Franz Schubert (1797-1828) who performed the wedding ceremony for the union of poetry and music. Schubert needs to be remembered for his “art song.” He wrote over 600 art songs besides all the other wonderful music he produced in his short lifetime. The personification of German

Romanticism was Robert Schumann (1810-56) and his wife Clara. She was the daughter of Robert’s first piano teacher and their love story is a very interesting and precious one.

Schumann’s art songs carried on the style of Schubert.

Hector Berlioz (1803-69) was a French composer who revolutionized the art of orchestration. He visualized an orchestra many times larger than any in existence then.

He thought in terms of several hundred instrumentalists and choruses with a thousand

296 voices. The program for the Symphony Fantastique and particularly the last scene, “The

Dream of a Witch’s Sabbath,” is very appropriate for Halloween time. This is program music which uses a fixed idea; one of Berlioz’s great contributions to musical form. The fixed form is the melody that appears in every movement. There are five movements in this composition. Each time it is changed somewhat but it serves as a clue to describe events that are supposedly taking place. Richard Wagner (1813-1883) would pick up on this idea and use it in a new way.

QUESTIONS: 1) What is the difference between the classical and romantic styles?

2) How did music and the music industry change throughout the nineteenth century? 3) Who are the various composers and what new and different things did they do with their music, art and lives?

FURTHER READING:

Barzun, Jacques. Berlioz and the Romantic Century. Vol 1. Boston: Little, Brown &

Co, 1950.

Longyear, Rey M. Nineteenth-Century Romanticism in Music. Engelwood Cliffs, New

Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1969.

Palisca, Claude, ed. Norton Anthology of Western Music. Vols 1& 2. New York:

Norton, 1980, 2001.

297 THE RENAISANCE OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

Robert Spiller

Our story begins about 1815 and it is marked by the cultural maturity of the young republic, in what some critics have called the first American literary renaissance. Even though the fertile land lying along the Atlantic Coast was already divided between the industrial North with its factories and rising cities and the agrarian South with its plantations and slaves, a common inheritance in a quarter century of peace had stabilized these two cultures so that they seemed to be one. And Americans could turn for the first time unreservedly to the things of the mind and the spirit. But fate with her accustomed whimsy chose as a home for that awakening not the political capital of Washington D.C., nor the common commercial capitals of New York and Charleston, but the quiet country town of Concord, Massachusetts.

It was Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) who both demanded and proclaimed this first coming of age of American literature when he addressed the assembled scholars of the Phi Beta Kappa society at Harvard College in 1837 on the assigned topic, “The

American Scholar.” “Year by year,” he told them, “we come up hither to read one more chapter of his biography. I read with some joy of the auspicious signs of the coming days as they glimmer already through poetry and art, through philosophy and science, through church and state. We have listened too long to the courting muses of Europe. We will walk on our own feet. We will work with our own hands, we will speak our own minds.”

Emerson had not achieved the independence of thought and feeling which he here preached to his fellow countrymen. Without much pain and searching of soul and the

298 calm confidence that seems to radiate from his first series of essays is a result of a long spiritual struggle, followed by the careful workmanship of the practiced artist. For this young Unitarian minister turned lecturer with the inheritor of five or more generations of devoted servants of the Lord. His ancestor, the Rev. Peter Buckley, was a founder of that well-named town of Concord where he himself finally settled and his father and grandfather and great-grandfather had been Congregational ministers through war and peace.

The hard firm shell of Puritan dogma had worn thin through generations of liberal attack, as a central consecration to the moral law remained firm. It is Emerson’s task to discover a way of living by the dictates of his intuition for good, without sacrificing that reliance on the self that was his inheritance, his Democratic man. His father had turned with his friend, William Ellery Channing (1780-1842), to the rational code of the Unitarians, but

Emerson took one step further. He believed intuition to be higher than logic, the moral sentiment to be above the rational or absolute law.

In 1832 a year after the death of his first wife he resigned from his church and took ship for Europe to rebuild his inner life. The essays for the ultimate result of this decision were forthcoming, but years of public lecturing on moral and cultural topics intervened.

History, self-reliance, compensation, love, friendship, the over soul, circles, intellect, art are some of the topics discussed in the volume of 1841 and in the second of 1844 he added the poet, experience, manners, nature, politics. Each essay is a gem of persuasive eloquence built up paragraph by paragraph in a descending spiral. Each paragraph a mosaic of gnomic phrases and sentences. Each word is chosen for its emotional impact as well as for its burden of meaning. Yet the books taken together are a single statement in poetic prose of a philosophy of life which is a personality rather than a system. In a

299 sense Emerson is speaking rather than writing throughout. His voice is at the high pitch of his intense intellectual and emotional charge. He wrote, “Trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string. Who so would be a man must be a non-conformist. The world reveals itself in a drop of dew. Let us unlearn our wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the Lord’s power and learn that the truth alone makes rich and great. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England and America its history in Greece. It will come as always unannounced and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”

I have said that the ease of such language is deceptive, that these essays are the work of the painstaking artist. I need only read through the pages of the 40 or 50 lectures from which these sentences and paragraphs were extracted to realize the care of this excellent artist. Each phrase was hammered out first on the public rostrum. Each paragraph was spoken once and spoken again. While he caught his breath the listeners in the silent hall bore testimony to its effect. The half dozen series of lectures that Emerson gave in the winters of 1835 to 1841 at the Masonic Temple in Boston were the proving ground of his literary life. There his basic philosophy was hammered into shape. There the medium was freed from the formalities of the sermon to work its way through the eloquence of the platform to the light cadences of the printed page. What ever doubts may have harassed

Emerson before and after the period of the lectures and essays were allayed and disciplined to silence during these few years.

In the little prose poem “Nature” in 1836 it stated what he called his first philosophy.

In the American scholar and divinity school addresses he proclaimed the need for every soul constantly to return to the sources, to that of God within for strength to confront both

300 the beauties and the complexities of the world outside the self, the world of nature and of society. The essays were but elaborations, point by point of his central faith. The simple statement of life’s guiding principles is based on the assumption that man is fundamentally good because his soul has put the presence in him of the Over-soul. This sees nature not as the antithesis of its principle but as the diversified and colorful statement of that underlying certainty, the moral law or the law of God and the natural law, the law of all things existing in exact parallel. This is Emanuel Swedenborg’s

(1688-1772) doctrine of correspondence that is little more than the anthropomorphic beliefs of words in the other English romantic poets, and given the sanction of philosophical statement.

The second of Emerson’s primary doctrines, that of intuition as the only way of penetrating experience to its underlying truth made it valid and indeed essential that man turned his mind to the world outside himself in an exited receptivity of spirit. Nature grew in beauty because it reflected a divine light. Man could submit to his senses because in so doing he could probe beyond the sensual. Here was truly a fit doctrine for a people whose world was expanding and for a promise of a solution to mortal error and frustration. Once he fought through his doubts and skepticism, Emerson had high hopes in an age of commerce. He had learned through much agony of mind that others were not ready as he was to live completely in the spirit and his later addresses and lectures spoke more directly to the aspirations and failures of man as he actually is. Responding to the doubts of his fellows, Emerson built for each of them a working philosophy. He came to believe that there is no chance or anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradual change.

301 Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament and there is alone with them. They pour on him benedictions and gifts and beckon him up to their thrones. On that instant and incessantly fall no storms or illusions.

He fancies himself in a crowd which sways this way and that and in his movement and doing he must obey. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will and think or act for himself? Every moment new changes and new showers of deceptions to baffle and distract him and when by and by for an instant the air clears and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around on their thrones, they alone with him alone. His idealism tempered by the pragmatism of new experience. The sage enunciates the laws by which men could live. Let each obey the iron law and trust himself, but learn again the wisdom of the world as something he must live with, even though inwardly he would obey only the truth. Such a man would inevitably have disciples and much as he fought them off, they came.

Like Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), and the younger

Ellery Channing (1780-1742), and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) who was his disciple for a time, only to become his peer and for some even to outdistance him in the literary value of his book, Waldon or Life in the Woods. At times Thoreau has almost an angry tone in his comments on human follies. He is often thought of as a misanthrope and his two years sojourn in his hut on Waldon Pond near Concord, a kind of get-away- from-it-all gesture. James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), a poet critic, is partly responsible for this impression because of his very unfriendly essay on Thoreau. Lowell was too much of a bookish gentleman to sympathize with the down-to-earth quality of this

302 solitary naturalistic poet and he said stupid unkind things about him which were dangerous because they were half truths. But Thoreau’s motives were all positive and there was no mere escape motivation in his experiment. He grew in the first place from his sympathy with Emerson’s way of thought. Emerson preached self-reliance and direct contact with nature as the only sure roads to truth and the full life. Thoreau took the preachment literally and decided to put it to the test. He was naturally a man of books rather than in the society of the out-of-doors. At Harvard he had spent much time in the library reading English poets and of all the transcendental group in the heyday of

Concord culture he was the one who read most avidly in the oriental poetry and philosophy.

Non-conformity seems to have been his birthright and he disappointed his family by refusing to marry, to take up a profession, to assume the conventional responsibilities of community life. After a year of living with the Emerson’s and doing their chores he accepted his host’s good natured invitation to go to his wood lot, or garden as Emerson called it, on Walden Pond, a two mile walk across the fields. Here he built his own hut so that he might live as he liked. In his book which is made up of rewritten passages from his journals every step in this experiment is recounted, analyzed and evaluated with the two years rolled into one so that the cycle of the seasons could provide a kind of natural unity for the whole. At no point does Thoreau reject humanity or even society. There is no hint of any wish to go native. All he asks is that the real values and the human experience be sorted out from the confusion of ordinary living and that we test what we are by living wholly in ourselves and in the present. Simplify, simplify, is his keynote, not reject, reject. His first long chapter is devoted to economy. Here he tests his ideas on

303 the lowest possible level of practicality on how few cents one may live. If the demands of income earning can be reduced to a minimum, the battle is more than half won. Then and only then can one turn to the ideal of positive living. I went to the woods, he tells us, because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not when I came to die discover that I had not lived. And in his concluding chapter he sums up what he had learned. If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with his success unexpected and common hours, an invisible boundary. New universal and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him, in proportion as he simplifies his life. The laws of the universe will appear less complex and solitude will not be solitude nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness.

Thoreau, the practical moralist, is the direct descendent of Benjamin Franklin, but his dreams were more utopian than anything Franklin ever dreamed. His aims and his underlying philosophy were more nearly those of Emerson. His basic beliefs were the perfectibility of man and the goodness of God. But it is not primarily as a moralistic philosopher that Thoreau is read today. His face in nature took him to the woods and fields and ponds as a friendly participant to their minute by minute life. The joy and excitement to be found in observing the habits of the common wild animals, the field mouse, the otter, the coon, the woodchuck, the careful record of each days’ advance of spring as the plants pushed up through the thawing ground, the cycles of weather and season are contagious. This is no mere scientific observing and classifying the data of nature.

304 Thoreau was a poet with the ability to experience acutely and then to relate his observations to an ideal, a dream, rather than to a scientific hypothesis. He left Walden because as he tells us he had several more lives to live and he could not spare any more time for that one. He had built his castles in the air and then put the foundations under them as he advises others to do. One need not stop with Walden once one has savored its earthy Yankee quality, for there is the long shelf of his journals and essays, largely unpublished until after his death, to say nothing of his notebook on the Concord

Maryneck Rivers with his brother John. But Walden will always remain Thoreau’s most characteristic and satisfying book and one of the most satisfying in characteristic books in all of American literature. John Fenimore Cooper’s (1789-1851) Leatherstocking might have written it if Cooper had made him a writer and it will do as a guide to the fields and woods and Yankee character today.

I’ve emphasized the idea that Emerson and Thoreau were both positive in their basic beliefs. They held that man is good but misguided and that all he need do is to cultivate his own resources and the resources of his world in order to realize his potentialities.

Historically this position is a reaction against the severe Calvinism of the Puritan fathers with its emphasis on the doctrines of original sin and elective grace. Echoes of the thundering sermons of the early preachers of hell-fire and damnation could still be heard at mid-19th century in the clean white New England meeting houses, or in the churches of the Dutch Calvinists of Albany where Melville spent his boyhood. That man is born in sin and can be saved only by the will of an arbitrary and absolute God was and is the core of the face of the fundamentalism of many sects and it was the guiding doctrine of the

Puritan immigrants of the 17th century. It seems now almost a part of the wooded hills

305 and stony fields of the Northern colonies. Together these two philosophies, or perhaps it would be better to call them religions, account for the consecrated idealism of the

American romantic movement in literature. The nature-loving idealism of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the social utopianism of Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) and his German philosopher friends seem pale and uncommitted when compared with the singleness of both sides the American view, that which sees man as inherently good and that which sees him as inherently evil. In both cases the result was much the same, an emphasis on a basic humanism that is divine in origin and natural in expression.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) and Herman Melville (1819-1891) base their thinking on the more fundamentalist view of the sinfulness of man, but the significant fact about their attitude is that they reject Calvinism intellectually, while they accept it instinctively and emotionally. This gives their similar ideas on man and destiny a tragic intensity, wholly lacking in the thought of Emerson and Thoreau but nonetheless in the

American native grain. Nowhere better than in Hawthorne’s short novel, The Scarlet

Letter, is this inner conflict of acceptance-rejection illustrated. Conceived first as a short story and then expanded to the length of a novelette on the advice of a publisher, this is a tale of Puritan Salem and is perhaps the most perfectly formed work of literary art that

America had produced up to this time. Inspired as Hawthorne tells us by his discovery in the Salem Custom House where he was somewhat unwillingly working on a bit of cloth with the letter A embroidered on it among packets of old letters. The story has a single dominant mood, a unity of setting, very closely related major characters in tragic and unresolved conflict for its central theme. With a classic thought of a love strong enough to break through the bonds of marriage, it is on one level a tale of adultery and its

306 consequences. But Hawthorne was himself too much involved emotionally in the structural frame of Calvinistic dogma as well as too deeply understanding of human psychology to leave this tale to the capricious plot alone for its effect. The psychological consequences of the conviction of sin in its absolution and more tentative admission by confession gives the story of Hester Pryne and her clergyman lover, Arthur Dymsdale, almost the intensity of the Shakespearian tragedy. Hester had come from England two years ahead of her elderly physician husband to establish their home in Salem, and when he arrived he found her with her child Pearl in the pillory. Refusing to reveal the name of her lover, Hester is condemned to wear the symbol of her adultery, while Roger assuming the name of Chillingsworth sets out to discover and persecute the unacknowledged father of his child. Gradually the level of action moves to the strange and secret psychological relationship between these four people. The crux of the conflict shifts from the fact of sin to the concealment of guilt and to that favorite theme of so many of Hawthorne’s tales, the violation of the sanctity of the human heart. In spite of himself apparently Hawthorne is drawn to the conclusion that Hester’s crime is one of nature, which when revealed gives her a kind of ennobling psychological freedom, while the weak but publicly respected Dimsdale gradually dissolves before the undermining and devious attacks of

Chillingsworth. Much has been written also about the elusive Pearl who is modeled on

Hawthorne’s own daughter, Una, but who in the story is not much more than a thinly embodied symbol of the ambiguous nature of evil as the world knows it. In psychological insight Hawthorne here as elsewhere in his writings shows himself to be far in advance of his time. But the strength of his art lies in his authentic and infinite knowledge of Puritan New England life, in his aesthetic mastery of his materials and his

307 use of life as symbol to illuminate experience. No one of that day with the possible exception of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) achieved the artistic discipline that this and many of Hawthorne’s shorter tales exhibit. With Poe, he became the developer if not the inventor of the short story form and once the limitations in his own Puritan horizons are overcome, he is one of the most rewarding of these early American writers for modern reading and study. His other novels retain most of the qualities of The Scarlet Letter, but they are more complex and therefore lack the intensity and unity of this, his masterpiece.

Herman Melville (1819-1891) was in many respects a deeper and more complex

Hawthorne. He shared Hawthorne’s Calvinistic inheritance together with his iron vein of skepticism, his profound psychological understanding and his aesthetic insights. But he drew into his work many more strands of the American literary tradition than did any of the New England group. His Calvinism came from his mother’s Hudson Valley Dutch family and he added to it a romantic idealization of far away lands that came from his

English seafaring father. Melville’s original affiliation was with the Knickerbocker group of Washington Irving’s (1783-1859) New York and there are many evidences of the humor and satire of the author of the sketchbook, particularly in Melville’s lighter work.

But the more profound concern for the destiny of the human soul overcame this relatively frivolous side of his character and his masterwork, Moby Dick, is primarily like

Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, the story of a human spirit in tragic agony and unresolved defeat at the hands of the inevitable. Captain Ahab is one of the great tragic heroes of all literature, more complex than most, more convincing and powerful than many. The story of Moby Dick is based on its author’s own wandering years after he ran away from his

308 Albany home and took ship from New York Harbor. The long course of his voyages carried him to Liverpool and back and then on a whaler like the Piquod of his great epic novel. From New Bedford to the South Seas, from there after several years of wandering among the Pacific Isles, he returned by an American man of war to Boston. Finally, he married and settled down to a decade of feverish writing in his farmhouse at Pittsfield in

Western Massachusetts. There he wrote Moby Dick, at the same time that his friend,

Hawthorne, was working on his novel, The House of the Seven Gables, in nearby Lennox.

Moby Dick, apparently, was written first as the tale of a South Sea adventure, with a quest for the powerful and semi-mythical white whale, with the destruction to other men and vessels left in the wake of this sea monster’s rampages and of life on a typical

American whaler. But sometime during its writing the revengeful obsession of the mad

Captain Ahab seems to seize the imagination of its author and the whole long tale had to be virtually rewritten. The reading of Shakespeare, particularly of Lear, and in conversations with Hawthorne may have been factors in the sudden deepening of the meaning of the story. Whatever the causes, there has seldom been a work of such scope written at such white heat. The author’s personality for the purposes of the narrative is split at the start between the wholly involved protagonist, the mad captain, and the narrator, a voice which asks in the opening sentence that he be called Ishmael, the outcast wanderer of Bible lore. A voice he remains, although he becomes increasingly personalized to the point where he is an active member of the crew and it is he who survives the final encounter with the white whale in which all others are lost. Between these two are a varied and motley crew with three mates from New England and their three savage harpooners, a Polynesian, an Indian, and a Negro. There is also the cabin

309 boy Pip and the fire worshipping Parsi, Fidala. The story once the crew is assembled and the anchor weighed is concerned with the daily routine of shipboard, relieved periodically by encounters with whales which must be slaughtered and passing whalers whose captains have their own tales to tell. But there are levels of meaning both above and below this circumstantial narrative. On the one hand a series of expository chapters, introducing subdivisions of a novel, discuss all aspects of the science and lore of whaling, and on the other hand there are frequent rhapsodic and symbolic interludes that make the line between reality and illusion become more and more faint. The psychological dominance of Ahab over the spirits and actions of each member of the crew is never lost sight of, however simple the narrative may become. And each small detail of life on shipboard, Ahab’s pipe, the dabloon or Spanish coin, the phenomenon of phosphorescence, the sextant, acquires sudden symbolic significance as the author’s wit and insight play their ambivalent game with the story. One minute the reader believes the author has totally lost control of his material, only to realize at the next there is a sharp tightening of tension as the vast tale moves to its smashing and vivid three chapter climax. Apparently, the gigantic effort of Moby Dick left its author exhausted and he never again reached such heights of romantic fervor but his presumed half century of silence between the publication of his semi-autobiographical novel, Pierre, in 1852, and his death in 1891 was far from unproductive. It is filled with efforts to discover on a lower plain the answer to the tragic impasse of Moby Dick in travel, poetry, sketches and the ironically inconclusive The Confidence Man. His final unpublished story of Billy Bud only deepens the mystery in spite of the efforts of his interpreters to translate it into an affirmative answer to the riddle of the universe. Melville in his later works, like Emerson

310 in his essay on experience, Hawthorne in his abortive romances of the later period and

Thoreau in the later and less illuminated passages of his journal, found that the world they had grown up in, the settled but exciting world of the young republic in the first frontier had begun to disintegrate by mid-century as the Civil War came closer and the ideals and impulses of romanticism began to show signs of exhaustion. Only such lower keyed poets as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) and James Russell Lowell

(1819-1891) would survive the national cataclysm. For this was the peak of the romantic movement in American literature, the year 1851, and Herman Melville, a man who wrote for a brief period over the face of the globe and who probed the depths and heights of human experience was its spokesman. In the aftermath, he was virtually forgotten, not to be revived and appreciated until the 1920’s. But now looking back at his work and at the literary movement of which it was the climax, it is not hard to see the strands of literary growth and influence from colonial times through the period of the Revolution and the literary experiments of the early years of the 19th century, weaving themselves finally into the tight cord of a great tragic prose ethic. Moby Dick is American literature at the point of fulfillment of its first great cultural cycle. The literature of the first frontier of the Atlantic Seaboard colonies had found at last its full and authentic expression.

QUESTIONS: 1. What were Emerson and Thoreau’s world views? How did they come to view man, nature, God, and the world? Describe and explain Emerson’s philosophy and/or religious view behind his lectures? Who was Thoreau and how did he take Emerson’s views further? What were Hawthorne and Melville’s world views? How did they come to view man, nature, God and the world in their literature? Are there distinct differences between the first two and the second two authors? Explain.

FURTHER READING:

Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: Norton, 2001.

311 NINETEENTH CENTURY RUSSIAN NOVELS

Douglas Gronberg

Nineteenth Century Russian novels, feared by many students because of huge casts of seemingly unpronounceable names and a mind-staggering number of pages, have made two general contributions to man’s understanding of nature.

First, Russian authors used and further developed literary realism. Nikolai Gogol

(1809-1852) and Ivan Turgenev (1818-1883) were influential in creating this realism and making it more than social criticism. Second, Feodor Dostoevski (1821-1881) and Leo

Tolstoy (1828-1910) contributed to the realm of ideas concerning the nature of man.

Dostoevski’s contribution was twofold. First, in his books, he was devoted to an examination of the dual nature of man, and second, he believed that man is a fallen creature redeemed through suffering. Tolstoy’s contribution is also twofold. First, his work affirms the value of love and trust, and second, he believed, like Rousseau, in man’s natural goodness.

Let us explore the historic background to literary realism. The greatest changes in the history of Western civilization came in the Nineteenth Century. The French

Revolution of 1789 and Napoleon caused an upheaval that completely destroyed

Europe’s old order. The Holy Roman Empire was dissolved and the Papal States were broken up. A spirit of nationalism grew as Germany and Italy achieved their dream of becoming autonomous states. Liberty in all realms – political, social, and economic – became Europe’s slogan. Simultaneously, the Industrial Revolution’s rapid spread over the continent brought unimaginable changes. A new class that had never existed before,

312 the Middle Class, sprang up and effectively established rule. Monarchs became only nominal powers. The Industrial Revolution also provided a greater wealth that was distributed more evenly. As a result, living conditions changed for the better, and the population increased.

Philosophical thought shifted. The technological innovations brought about by the

Industrial Revolution spawned more scientific discoveries. As a result, the scientific outlook prevailed and science became accessible to the masses. This “outlook” soon permeated all aspects of human ideas and aspirations, and it raised hopes for a better future. Darwin’s theory of evolution that appeared after 1859 was enthusiastically accepted because it joined in the spirit of the times by predicting the possibility of unlimited human progress.

Scientific method that called for objective observation became an influence in the realm of literature. The advocates of realistic literary theory argued that objectivity would lead to truth. Realistic writers, therefore, became interested in the systematic description of contemporary society, the everyday society, and the society of the middle class.

The following authors illustrate literary realism. Stendhal (pseudonym of Mari Henri

Beyle 1783-1842), the French novelist said, “the novel is a mirror walking along the road.” If one really thought about this, novels would be incredibly boring and luckily no novel, including Stendhal’s are this realistic. Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), the Russian dramatist, made the following comparison: “To the chemist nothing on earth is unclean.

A writer must be as objective as a chemist; he must abandon the subjective line; he must

313 know that dung heaps play a very respectable part in a landscape, and that evil passions are as inherent in life as good ones.” Thus, realism holds that the purpose of art is to depict life with complete and objective honesty. Realism values concrete, verifiable details rather than sweeping generalities and impersonal photographic accuracy more than the artist’s individual interpretation of experience. Realism’s problem is that works of art are written by human beings who inevitably express their personalities and points of view. In the words of Joseph Conrad, “even the most artful writer will give himself away in about every third sentence.”

Nikolai Gogol is generally credited with introducing realism to the Russian literary scene. His first literary success was a play called The Inspector General that satirized the irresponsible, petty officers in the Russian government. The play pleased the Russian sophisticates and eventually won Gogol the approval of the Czar – even though government bureaucrats were enraged. After his success Gogol left Russia and lived in

Western Europe. While there he was influenced by the European realistic writers, and, at the same time wrote his masterpiece, Dead Souls.

Dead Souls is the humorous account of a great hoax. Tchitichikov, the main character, takes advantage of a loop- hole in the Russian tax structure regarding the ownership of serfs. Tchitichikov hopes to gain collateral for a mortgage so he can raise some money for himself. The scheme seems to be working quite well until Tchitichikov begins to vacillate between carrying out his swindle and trying to gain respectability.

The book is significant in two ways – one way has a superficial significance and the other has real significance. Superficially, the book is an indictment against serfdom. The feudal system existed in Russia until the middle of the 19th Century. This “institution”

314 was fair game for all reformers and social critics, and Dead Souls made Gogol a forerunner of a literary movement against serfdom. The book was also the first to introduce the contemporary social element into Russian literature.

The second significance of Gogol’s Dead Souls concerns the author’s idealistic or universal aim. Gogol is concerned with the greed that corrupts man, a human condition that serves as a vantage- point to satirize the failings of his countrymen. The idealistic purpose of Gogol does realism a favor because it refuses to limit realism to a mere anatomy of society as social critics would demand. Realism become not a thing in itself, but rather a tool used by the writer-and a new tool at that- to achieve the idealistic end he aims for. Thus, Gogol introduced realism to the Russian literary scene and he refused to limit realism to being a mere anatomy of society.

Unfortunately Gogol’s contemporaries misrepresented him. Early 19th Century

Russian literary critics were looking for a social realist. When Gogol came along and published Dead Souls, the critics emphasized the superficial aspects of the novel until

Gogol – in reality a political reactionary, a superpatriot, - was considered a revolutionary by the Czarist regime. When Gogol died Ivan Turgenev wrote an obituary in appreciation of Gogol’s literary contributions. Turgenev was, as a result, jailed and later exiled.

Turgenev played a double role in the 19th Century Russian novel. He was the first

Russian author to gain recognition in the West. He lived much of his life in Paris.

Turgenev was popular in the West because he was in the mainstream of the European novel and because of 19th Century ideology. This meant he was a realist. His books displayed an apparent absence of the author – that is, there was no apparent interference

315 by the author in the book’s narrative, and he was economical – that is he was never wordy or verbose.

Turgenev became the literary voice of the “Westernizers” in Russia. Turgenev was a liberal, a Westernizer who made his literary reputation with Sportsman’s Sketches, a lesser work that painted a compassionate picture of the peasant serfs before their emancipation. All of Turgenev’s books combine three things: A gallery of Russian types, who are combined with a topical interest in social and political problems, and with a romantic love interest. This combination saved him from the superficiality of being a mere social critic, and it made his novels more universal in theme.

Fathers and Sons, Turgenev’s best work, is a realistic novel set in contemporary

Russia. The book illustrates Turgenev’s power of characterization by drawing vivid pictures of the men and women in the story. The book also presents an ideological conflict in human terms. Scientific materialism, serfdom, social reform, and the radical philosophy of nihilism are all discussed. However, the book is not really about these problems. The book’s problem, as the title suggests, is about the age-old conflict between parents and their children, between different generations and their different points of view. The sons are at odds with their fathers in Turgenev’s Russia. There is

Bazarov, the uncompromising scientific utilitarian who shows his contempt for convention, manners and human feelings. Ironically, Bazarov cannot live up to his principles, and he falls in love. There is also Arkady, Bazarov’s disciple, who weakens, becomes unfaithful, and shows his commonplace mind before the novel ends. The story is about personal relationships, not social issues. Bazarov’s iron principles fall to fate

316 and chance. His calculating reason is defeated by the greater powers of love. He falls in love with an aristocrat and fights for honor in a duel with Arkady’s uncle, and in death.

Unfortunately, Turgenev, like Gogol, was misunderstood. The Czar’s secret police praised Fathers and Sons because they felt Turgenev was exposing youthful reformers as nihilists. As a result, the youthful reformers and their allies in the literary critics blasted

Turgenev for being a czarist dupe. Turgenev made his stay in Paris permanent.

Fyodor Dostoevski followed in the literary footsteps of Gogol and Turgenev. He utilized the realistic mode in his novels, but realism was pre-empted by Dostoevski’s deep insights into the problem of man’s existence. He was concerned with psychological realism and the individual’s dual personality in the struggle between good and evil. His second concern was with the idea of moral redemption through suffering. “Man,” wrote

Dostoevski, “is fallen but is free to choose between evil and Christ, the good. Choosing

Christ means taking upon oneself the burdens of humanity in love and pity since everybody is guilty of all and before all."

In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevski explored his concerns in the person of

Raskolnikov, the novel’s main character. Raskolnikov – a solitary, ill humored intellectual writes an article contending that there are superior persons who are above ordinary laws and moral standards. He has discovered this principle, he feels, because he himself is one of these superior persons. The gist of his article is that any action by the superior person is morally justified so long as it ultimately benefits humanity. This theory, combined with a personal need for money to continue his education (remember that in educating himself he would benefit humanity) results in Raskolnikov’s planning to

317 murder an old pawnbroker. The crime is carefully plotted, but its execution is as confusing as its motives. The slaying is carried out through impulse with much cunning but much more blundering. Raskolnikov kills his victim, but he panics, misses most of the money, and fails to examine the money and jewels he does steal. The rest of the criminal aspects of the story involve a cat and mouse game with the police that eventually ends in Raskolnikov’s confession.

Moral regeneration is the punishment part of the story. The sources of surrender lie much deeper than Raskolnikov’s logic – the logic that produced his ideas concerning the superior person. Raskolnikov is disgusted with a life of lying, fear, and constant alertness, and he is exhausted by the effort of leading such a life. Because of this his theory of the superior person backfires. He realizes that “the very fact of his ineptness and worry proves that he himself is not such a superior person, for if crime really were trivial to a man of his stature, he would be able to regard it as trivial.

Crime and Punishment is the portrayal of man’s dual nature and redemption through intellectual, mental, and physical suffering. Dostoevski used the tools of realism that he inherited from Gogol and Turgenev, and he added an important new dimension – the psychological realism that objectively reveals the forces at work in the troubled mind of

Raskolnikov.

Leo Tolstoy (or Lev Nikolaevich) can be contrasted with Dostoevski. Dostoevski was dramatic in his writing. His novels have an Alfred Hitchcock tone to them while

Tolstoy was epic-like. War and Peace is a historic novel that chronicles Napoleon’s invasion and a nation’s resistance to foreigners. Dostoevski believed man was fallen, but

318 Tolstoy believed in man’s natural goodness – a goodness that comes with a return to nature. Dostoevski appealed to the past and wanted a hierarchical society, while Tolstoy rejected history and status. Their similarities include a deep spirituality, a rejection of basic materialism, and the acceptance of the theories of literary realism.

War and Peace is about Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. The individual characters are of primary importance. Dolokhov is a man of personal fearlessness and cold cynicism; Anatol Kuragin is one of the most convincing debauched characters who is addicted to excessive indulgence. Prince Bolkousky is rigid in routine and principles;

Nikolai Restof, a dashing extrovert who reveled in life as a soldier, marries and finds contentment in family life; and Pierre, the illegitimate son of a nobleman, also finds self respect and contentment in marriage and family life. Tolstoy makes it plain that though

Napoleons, empires, movements, and ideas may come and go, human love, trust, and everyday domestic life are the abiding values.

In another Tolstoy’s work, the The Death of Ivan Illyich he points out that man is leading the wrong kind of life; that he should return to the essentials, to real existence, that is to nature. Ivan Illyich is a Russian judge who contracts a disease and the story is about his death. First, the reader sees Ivan Illyich slowly awaken to the realization of the falsity of life and ambitions. The isolation imposed by his disease causes Ivan Illyich to recognize the hypocrisy of his family, his friends, and his doctors. He is slowly driven to a recognition that death is the one force incapable of being imitated and that this recognition lies behind all of man’s attempts to hide from the reality of death.

319 Secondly, Tolstoy reveals the tendency to hide death and to hide from death in the actions of the people around Ivan Illyich. His wife can remember only of the delay of her marriage. His colleagues speculate about the room his death will make for promotions in the court. His doctors think only of the name of the disease, not the patient.

All of the people around Ivan Illyich, except his son Vasya and his servant Gerasim, are egotists and hypocrites living behind facades. Vasya is too frightened and shy to erect a façade. Gerasim, however, is a peasant who is near to nature and who is not afraid of recognizing death. Only Gerasim mentions death, while all other characters try to conceal the truth from Ivan Illyich.

The reader of the story will notice that Tolstoy seems harsh and violent in his satire of these characters. In relating details Tolstoy seems too realistic – “he does not shy away from the smell of disease, the physical necessity of using a commode, or the sound of screaming.” This naturalistic detail makes us realize that we are mortal just as Ivan

Illyich is mortal, and that “the life of most civilized people is a great lie because it disguises and ignores its dark background, the reality of Death.”

To summarize, Gogol wrote of the greed that corrupts, that corrupted Tchitchikov and resulted in his downfall. Turgenev wrote of the conflict between generations – the

“generation gap” as we call it – and of the problems of a philosophy that cannot overcome the greater powers of love, honor, and death. Dostoevski examined the psychological problem of man’s dual nature, and the internal struggle between good and evil and the problem of redeeming fallen man. Tolstoy also dealt with truth based on fact

320 or reality. War and Peace affirmed the value of human love and trust, and The Death of

Ivan Illyich suggested that man should toss out the externals that hide the realities of life.

The literary mode used by these authors to write on truth based on fact or reality is another contribution to man’s overall view of himself. The 19th Century Russian novelists rejected the excesses of Romanticism and expanded the theme of art by placing

“the human heart in conflict with itself” in a setting that included a depiction of social and intellectual conditions as the authors found them in real life. Their realism was not the totally objective realism of the social worker or the psychologist, nor was it the realism of the social critic. It was the realism that evoked “the world of their time, an imaginative picture …which seems truer and will last a lot longer than that of the historian or sociologist.”

QUESTIONS: 1. How do Nikolai Gogol and Ivan Turgenev convey realism? 2. What do Dostoevski and Tolstoy teach about the nature of man? 3. What truths or lessons in life do the stories presented in this section on these four authors teach about life, man and God?

FURTHER READING:

Bayley, John. Tolstoy and the Novel. New York: Viking Press, 1967.

Hingley, Ronald. Dostoyevsky: Life and Work. London: Paul Eck, 1978.

321 The 19th Century English Novel

Robert Voight

The Victorian reading public firmly established the novel as the dominant literary genre of the 19th Century. At the outset of the Victorian period, no one considered the novel to be a significant art form. But by the end the novel had completely triumphed over poetry as the spiritual nourishment for English readers. Sir Walter Scott (1771-

1832) had created a large novel reading public and had made novel reading respectable.

He was also responsible for the strengthening of the tradition of the three- volume novels.

The Victorian novel is usually called a triple-decker. It’s written in three volumes. Also, the publication of novels came in monthly installments, especially those of Dickens. The poor would pool their pennies together to purchase novels. The three- volume and the installment format encouraged the novelist to be diffuse in their writing and also encouraged them to write in a picturesque manner. Every month the writer had to reach a climax of some kind so the reader would want to buy next month’s installment. This tended to make for episodes, rather than a well-knit novel.

Henry James (1843-1916), toward the end of the century, was chiefly responsible for what could be termed, “the well made novel.” He substituted a more compact form for the lengthy rambling Victorian form. So through this era the triple-decker, and the installment form, tended to diffuse the novel, with many characters, many climaxes, and many episodes. But toward the end of the century the compacted novel concentrated on a few characters and centralized around one problem.

322 The English novel originated as a middle class literary form. It was the logical reading matter for the 19th Century middle class who had the money and the time to read.

Escapism had become a psychological necessity to an era that was bedeviled by chaotic industrialism and uneven progress. Through reading novels, man could escape from the realities of life. Realism was the justification for the conscious reader as escapism satisfied unconscious needs. Victorian novelists appealed to their audience with a semblance of a real world. The novel formed the myths and epics for the age.

The outstanding characteristics of the novel are these. First of all, the acceptance of middle class epics based on values. The good characters conformed to the principle of middle class orthodoxy and were always properly rewarded. Social orientation, the major problem created by the middle class novelist is the adjustment of the individual to his society. Second, the novels dealt with the adjustment of the individual to his society.

Three, there was an emphasis on characters. The middle class novelist strove to produce fascinating, rounded characters who resembled people their readers knew, or people that their readers would like to know. Most of the characters were middle class, in middle class settings, and with middle class preoccupations. Four, the hero, or the central figure, through demonstrating human weaknesses, is molded to the middle class ideal of the rational man of virtue. Thus, the hero becomes the rational man of virtue. Five, human nature is believed to be fundamentally good and lapses from the middle class code are errors of judgment. These errors of judgment are corrected by growing up. Six, the hero is usually an individual that, even though he may have human weaknesses, he is molded to the middle class code of morality and thus becomes that rational man of virtue. Seven, since human nature in this genre and with Victorian humanism was considered

323 fundamentally good, even if a person falls, his fall is usually an error of judgment rather than any innate sin. This may be corrected by maturation.

One of the greatest of the Victorian novelists and one of the earliest was Charles

John Huffman Dickens (1812-1870) born at Landport. He was a grandson of a footman and a maid. His father was a minor government clerk who lived beyond his income.

However, the family fortune declined and he lived in poverty. The insecurity of his childhood colored his entire lifetime and his writings. In 1824 his father was thrown into the Marshallsee Prison for failure to pay his debts and Charles had to work in a factory making shoe blacking. His formal education ended at age 15 and Dickens became a legal reporter and eventually a political reporter. The success of the Pickwick Papers induced him to marry Katherine Hogarth in 1836.

Looking at Dickens, possibly no other writer in English history, not even

Shakespeare, has so engrossed the attention of his age. At least one out of every ten people in the English speaking world has read or heard his novels read. No other novelist in English has had such complete success with his readers from the highest to the lowest members of society. The Victorians also admired him as a reformer. His popularity arose from his denunciation of specific ills that everyone hated and his advocacy of improvements that everybody supported. Even the most devastating attacks by Dickens upon contemporary society are aimed not against middle class ideals, but against the failure of men to live up to those ideals. Dickens was essentially a comprehensive novelist. He took in all classes of society and the world he created was indeed a world with all the variety of the actual world. He used the novel quite deliberately as a vehicle for criticism of society. His plots enabled him to represent in the mirror of his own

324 world, a fuller picture of the total society of his day than any English novels have achieved before or since.

Oliver Twist (1837-39) described with symbolic power the dark underworld of the poor. The pitiful figure of Oliver holding out his little bowl and asking for more is a symbol of all the needy children in the world pleading for something to eat. In such universalizing Dickens made magic. At the center of most of Dickens’ novels one finds this child who is the victim of the circumstances of the world. The isolation of the child is at the center of most of his works like Oliver Twist (1837-1839), and David

Copperfield (1849-1850).

The Old Curiosity Shop (1840-41) achieved the firmest bond between the writer and reader in English literature in its time. Before the story ended, the novel was selling

100,000 copies of each issue of the magazine in which it was published. The theme of

The Old Curiosity Shop is that of the persecuted innocent individuals fleeing from the wicked city of wrath and finding refuge only in death. In realistic guise it is the old allegory of virtue and beauty hounded from a dirty world that cannot appreciate them. In

Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44) Dickens stated, that this novel is to show how selfishness propagates itself and to what a great giant it may grow from small beginnings. Probably the best of the Victorian Christmas books and the most popular Christmas story in the

English speaking world is A Christmas Carol (1843). This modern morality play about the Christmas spirit criticizes man’s selfishness, and the relentless competitive spirit.

Dickens believed a sense of brotherhood should suffuse mankind and to Dickens,

Christmas is purely human and secular, rather than supernatural. Christmas should be a sharing of physical goods and mortal love with all ones fellows.

325 In Domby and Sons (1846-48), although Dickens stated the theme as pride, the dominating concept is the inhumanity of a system that reduces everything to the power of money. The theme of money runs through all of Dickens’ later works. Money itself becomes a symbol for those things that go with it, such as power or position. The lust for money through inheritance is the theme of Bleak House (1852). Money is the theme of

Great Expectations (1861). Pip, who is perhaps Dickens’ finest character in a naturalistic mode, is perverted in his natural affections and cut off from those whom he loves by the expectation of money. And it is the final irony of Pip’s faith that the money to which he owes everything is ill gotten. It comes from a convict’s hoard. In his later novels,

Dickens’ social criticism moves from specific cases to the indictment of an entire society and to the general defects in human character. In Hard Times (1854), we find a track that attacks the entire system of industrialization, the industrialist, capitalism, and the power and position that wealth is able to buy. Little Dorrit (1855-57) marks the height of

Dickens’ sociological interests. Even as the chancery court was the oppressive symbol of

Bleak House, the Marshallsee Prison is more the sober symbol of Little Dorritt. In Little

Dorritt he portrays all the world as a prison and society is trapped in a vast house of bondage.

William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-63) was born in Calcutta, India, the son of a high government official. His mother had been the reigning belle of Anglo-Indian society. His father died in 1820 and Thackeray was sent to England where he lived with relatives and experienced many unhappy school years. Thackeray went on to more pleasant years at Charterhouse and then to Cambridge in 1829. During his two college years he wrote comic pieces and a burlesque poem. For a decade, Thackeray, under

326 many pseudonyms contributed numerous short pieces for periodicals that were predominantly humorous.

Vanity Fair established him as a novelist. No novelist has given us an analysis of man in society based on so trivial a view of life as Thackeray does in Vanity Fair. This is implicit in the very title that has a different meaning for Thackeray from which it had for

John Bunyan in Pilgrim’s Progress. He awoke in the middle of the night and this little episode in “Vanity Fair” from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress came to his mind. Vanity

Fair represents the whole of society and in all of men’s activities except one, and for

Bunyan it is the world itself and therefore Vanity Fair is of the devil. The world’s activities are vanity, because they lead to damnation. So every moment in Bunyan, immortal souls are in the balance. But with Thackeray, the word “vanity” and the whole concept of Vanity Fair have undergone a change in meaning. To Thackeray, vanity is simply self- esteem, the desire to be thought well of by the world. So this becomes the motive for human behavior. Wherever he saw man, he saw a snob. And snobbery, which is the manipulating for social position and the pretense to a status rather higher than the person’s true one, he saw as the main driving force of man in his society. This is the whole theme of Vanity Fair; tenth-rate people trying to become ninth-rate people.

Anthony Trollup (1815-1882) was a native Londoner, son of an unsuccessful barrister and Frances Trollup, his mother. Trollup was a remarkably successful author of about 115 novels. Shabby gentility made Anthony’s school days at Marlow and

Winchester miserable. His resourceful mother, secured him a clerkship in the post office at the age of nineteen. As an important official in the post office he traveled extensively

327 throughout the British Isles and throughout the world. Trollup invented the pillar- box, or the mail- box to us, the receptacle for mailing letters on the street corner.

Trollup depicts the entrenched values of the 19th Century Englishman. The industrial capitalist and the laborers are virtually absent from his novels. However, he ranges through the entire middle class spectrum from the little tradesmen to the new commercial pier. The 20th Century interest in Trollup is largely based upon the nostalgia for the secure Victorian world he portrayed in his earlier novels. He portrays a world of English gentlemen intent upon maintaining personal dignity and social respectability and domestic sanctity. The central conflict in his major novels concerns a struggle to retain his cherished way of life against the assault of outward forces and/or inner traitors who would subvert this way of life. He’s the novelist of the status quo. The Way We Live

Now (1875) was unpopular. It is an angry social satire about the corruption of England’s gilded age. The feverish craving for wealth and social prestige pushes aside all the stabilizing restraint of older virtues. The only success now is money and money became

God. This pessimistic outburst is an outraged English gentleman’s protest against the triumph of mammon and a world of lost dignity and honor.

Charles Reed (1814-1884) was the son of an Oxfordshire squire. Reed’s brilliant

Oxford University career insured him a lifelong fellowship at Magnum College. Most of his novels followed the reforming manner of Dickens. He objected to the prison conditions, to cruel insane asylums, and the riotous conditions of labor. He did write one masterpiece, a historical novel, The Cloister and the Hearth (1861). This is the story of

Erasmus, the great Renaissance scholar.

328 Charles Kingsley, the son of a vicar (An Anglican Church parish priest) spent his early years on the South Coast. He attended Cambridge and was given a living at

Ebbersley in Hampshire. He occupied this position the rest of his life. In 1859 he became a chaplain to Queen Victoria. It is from one of his statements that Marx got his famous condemnation of religion as “an opiate of the people.” This is a misconception of

Kingsley’s objections in his work, Politics of the People, to the apathy of Christians towards the suffering of their fellow men. In other words, Kingsley was saying that because you are a Christian it does not excuse you from trying to better the conditions of your fellow men. So he wrote that Christianity was becoming an opiate of the people, lulling them to sleep so that they do not see the condition of their suffering fellow men.

Marx took this out of context and made it the battle cry of Communism against

Christianity. Kingsley was actually a supporter of the social gospel – that Christianity should work for the social betterment of people not just for their conversions. Kingsley saw reform as essentially Christian brotherhood. So the burning sincerity of Kingsley in his depiction of slums, worse then pig sties, and the brutality of labor, probably did more to awaken the conscience of smug Victorians than any other 19th Century Victorian work.

The novel of psychological and intellectual emphasis rebelled against the model of the Victorian novel and its middle class ethics and morals. In these novels the characters refuse to reform to the principles of middle class orthodoxy and desire to be

“individuals.” Moreover, there is an emphasis more upon the inner nature of the individual characters. The central hero is not a hero at all, but a compromiser. The rebels are still sober Victorians, convinced that although the current values are wrong, there is a fixed standard of conduct and a viewpoint that should be adopted.

329 George Elliott, whose real name was Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880) was the daughter of a farm manager. At the age of eight when she was reading Scott’s Waverly, she was interrupted and did not get to finish it, so she wrote her own conclusion to that work.

After a strongly evangelical private education, she became her father’s housekeeper and at Conventry she became acquainted with free thinkers, Charles Bray and Charles

Hennell and they converted her to agnosticism. She has been called the first modern novelist. She was a proponent of the positivism of August Comte (1798-1857). Comte saw three stages in the development of civilization: theological, metaphysical, and positivist. He believed that Europe was now in the positivist or scientific era. Older concepts of God, faith, and immortality should be discarded in favor of a religion of humanity. Thus Elliott insisted that men receive their rewards and punishments here, not in the hereafter. She adopted the scientific attitude towards social behavior. Cause and effect relationships in politics, economics, religions, and all other areas explain human conduct. Thus, she writes from the concept of determinism.

In Silas Marner, the most familiar of Elliott’s novels, she said, that “favorable changes” become the God of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying the law they believe in. Thus she held fast to determinism in the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind. Human beings were made for good or ill by their actions. Her moral beliefs chimed in with the findings of contemporary science.

In Middlemarch (1871-72), possibly her greatest novel, she indicts a society that denies people an opportunity to learn and become cultured. She believed the environment permitted proper self- realization to non-intellectual individuals, but an individual with a searching constructive spirit was fated to frustration.

330 Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) held to a revolutionary thought that provided Meridith with a comic view of life but this evoked the tragic view of life from the ultra-sensitive

Hardy. Hardy felt that man is an alien in an impersonal universe at the mercy of sheer chance. Biological urges implanted in him by the blind struggle for survival thwart his pitiful dreams for self- improvement. There is no God and no one cares.

Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) brought a greater and truer sense of cosmopolitanism than any previous author. He experimented in formal language, with no concern for the familiar problems of the contemporary novel. His theses were honor, guilt, moral alienation, and expiation. He was not interested in his characters getting on in life. He was pre-occupied with man’s responsibility to himself. And he believed this ultimately hinged on brotherhood. In The Nigger of the Narcisus (1897) the ship becomes a microcosm of the world of man where only the unified efforts and fellow feelings of mankind can save our species from the destruction of impersonal nature. In Lord Jim

(1900), the most notable of his early works, the theme is guilt and atonement. The failure of Jim was not so much due to cowardice as it was to paralysis of the will. He felt this paralysis of the will was a strange evil in every man that was unexplainable. It overrides training and conscious purpose. But Jim finds expiation for his mistakes in the sacrifice of himself. So he struggles with the themes of honor, guilt, sin, and expiation. In

Nostromo (1904), his masterpiece, we find an entire nation with every class of society represented. Conrad’s main purpose here is to scrutinize all of Western history and literature. He analyzes the motives that produce modern capitalism and imperialism and all the selfish dreams and exploitation represent only part of the capitalist drive. The end product for Conrad is the economic crushing of freedom of brotherhood. He feels that

331 this fictitious republic has imposed a tyranny more devastating upon the peoples of its time than all other civilizations.

The novel thus moved from defending Victorian middle class ethics, to social realism, to positivism and determinism. The novel became a vehicle for the exploration of differing positions in philosophy and to the modernistic-agnostic-atheistic mindset.

Novels became a way of making difficult and modern ideas popular and easier to understand and they thus helped to the shape middle class readers ideas and values. Not all novels flowed with the modern trends but for the most part literary trends follow the latest ideas, science and politics either in denigrating them or lifting them up.

QUESTIONS: Identify the authors and their works in each of the spectrums of thought: Victorian Middle Class ethics, social realism, positivism and determinism.

What novels have you read that have a pronounced thesis underlying the action and complex characters who give the story life? What makes for a good novel?

FURTHER READING:

ANY OF THE ABOVE AUTHORS

Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature.

Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953.

Howe, Irving, ed. Literary Modernism. Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications,

Inc., 1967.

332 HUMANITIES AS WORLD HISTORY

Gary K. Pranger

“God has set eternity in the hearts of men, yet they cannot fathom what He has done

from the beginning to the end.” Ecclesiastes 3:11

The subject of “Humanities” should deal with all that is human on the planet earth.

In the traditional curriculum “Humanities” has meant following the development of civilization and particularly European civilization from ancient times until the present.

With this traditional curriculum have come misconceptions that Western culture and civilization is superior, that Christianity is an invention of European culture, and that the secular modern era has triumphed and is the only reality.

To be fair, “culture” and “civilization” have taken place and spread from ancient times and centers such as Sumeria, Egypt, India, Ethiopia, and China. Humanities 213 and 214 courses only cover 500 years of history (1600-2000), however the history of mankind and civilization go back at least 4000 years. Morally and spiritually all cultures and civilizations in all times are inadequate and have failed. Western civilization, like the rest of the world, in its highest intellectual wisdom has failed to find the answer to man’s alienation from God, nature, and his own restless, violent, selfish nature. However, one must understand that Western European culture and civilization did become Christianized and that it did have a “Reformation” that pointed to Christ alone as the only way to salvation and truth. Christianity and the Bible became defining religious and cultural parts of Western Civilization and the basis for societal reform and the rule of law. The rule of law triumphed over tyranny and revenge like no other place in the world. It is a

333 truism in history that where law ends tyranny and totalitarianism begins. Moreover, the sciences did bring a revolution in technology and the way each successive generation since the 1600’s has lived and these are the reasons for this text.

The History of Religion worldwide pervaded, undergirded, defined, and created cultures and civilizations. There has been no tribe, tongue, people in any place or time that has not been religious or had a “religion” in some form. Some of the evidence for this in archeology is in the countless tombs, temples, and ceremonial vessels unearthed in every part of the world that speaks to man’s unceasing belief in the spiritual and the afterlife. The Bible, the most complete and uniform Ancient text, tells us that God created all things including mankind. But mankind rebelled and rejected God for his and her own ideas about God, themselves and their ways of life and thus mankind became blind to the reality of who and what the one and only God is all about. However, every culture, tribe and tongue has a creation story with a creator god and a flood story no matter how fantastic and distant they are from the accounts in the Bible. The Bible and history also tells us that Satan and his demonic host have conditioned this blindness to create an endless stream of religions, superstitions, and false beliefs. Ultimately all of world history is in a spiritual warfare in which God has invaded and triumphed over His own creation and all of human history through His son Jesus Christ, though we do not and will not see its ultimate fulfillment until Christ’s second coming. And yet saved and redeemed men and women already can and have experienced this victory in the spiritual freedom and wonder of a relationship with Jesus Christ even in the midst of the mundane, the pain, and the destructiveness of this world. Christ’s unconditional love transcends

334 and breaks through all of the sin, and failings of this world to reclaim, redeem, and remold.

The secular far from triumphing over religion has only revealed the emptiness, the deception and failure of men who believe that there is no God or the spiritual in mankind, only material, biological man. The words “modern” and “ancient” really have little meaning and these words signify no superiority one way or another. The “modern” man can be just as immoral and violent in his mind and spirit as any ancient man was in his actions and attitude and visa versa.

On the positive side, all peoples, tribes and tongues in all times around the world were created by God and for Him and His purposes. The saved and redeemed from all these peoples, tribes and tongues will have their place in eternity before His throne. Even now they have much for us to learn and appreciate as all have a history, a literature, whether oral or written, the arts of music, painting, and sculpture, etc. All peoples living today around the world take pride in their history, religion and culture even when they do not know much of it themselves. On the other hand, historically significant episodes in each land and country, no matter how ancient, can be remembered and celebrated by those living in the present. History does impact the present day history. One could say many people wear their history as they represent their individual, family, local and national history. Thus, all these things are worthy of study in the world of humanities.

The only drawback here is getting experts to contribute articles to include into this text.

However, this text is meant to change and grow as the needs of our education change.

335 Thus, make no mistake about the intentions of the authors, all areas of the world deserve some attention and study. The following articles are the first pieces for a more

“world” satisfying humanities text.

336 CHINA: ANCIENT TIMES TO 1644

Gary K. Pranger

ANCIENT CIVILIZATION 2200-1000 B.C.

Information on the first known civilization in China, called the Shang Dynasty, that developed near the Yellow River is derived form the so-called “dragon bones” first discovered in 1899. These oracle bones were painted with Chinese characters and were used to ask the gods questions. Shamans or religious men called on the spirit world of gods and demons for special knowledge. An earlier civilization existed between 2205 and 1523 B.C. known as the Hsia dynasty and many Chinese myths exist about it.

Historians are slowly gathering evidence to validate this dynasty. It should be remembered that for a hundred years it was thought that the Shang dynasty was a myth.

The Shang was possibly the first and certainly the most civilized of a number of principalities located in the Huang Ho (or Yellow River) valley. It is known to have had a system of writing using a brush on ivory or bronze, domesticated animals, and an organized army of over 5,000. The system of writing in pictographs was the most important single contribution; some symbols are still recognizable today, although most were simpler. The fact that the monosyllabic nature of the Chinese language has not changed accounts in part for the continuity of the writing system.

The practice of divination employing the use of oracle bones was combined with the worship of the one creator God called Shang Ti. However, the creator God receded in

337 Chinese religion. Ancestor worship was begun in this period with the division of China into ancestral or family clans.

CLASSICAL CIVILIZATION 1000 B.C. – 500 A.D.

Most of the chief characteristics of Chinese civilization were developed during the classical period. Chinese political, religious, and social philosophies were established. A highly centralized system of imperial government and bureaucracy was formed out of petty principalities. During the Ch’in (or Qin) dynasty 221-206 B.C. the building of the

Great Wall was begun in an attempt to keep out barbarian invaders. It is from the word

Ch’in that China is named as this emperor was the first to unify most of the country. The one and only Ch’in Emperor Shi Huang ti was an exceptionally cruel and feared emperor.

His people were made to work on his massive projects which included the Great Wall and his own massive burial chamber that was surrounded by life size terra cotta warrior armies modeled from his own soldiers.

CONFUCIANISM

Confucius (Kung Fu-tze) lived from 551- 470 B.C. in the province of Lu and was a would-be government official of little significance. However, his incidental life as a teacher was extremely important. The main purpose of Confucius’ teachings was to bring social order into an era of political chaos and confusion. The Confucian code became the most successful of all systems of conservatism, lasting 2000 years as the chief ideology of the world’s largest country. Confucius believed that only through harmonious relations among individuals could true harmony between man and nature be reached. Each person was to assume a specific place in society, with specific duties and

338 modes of conduct known as li or propriety. This was accomplished by a system of superiors and inferiors. The Five Relationships of superiors over inferiors were prince over subject; father over son; husband over wife; elder brother over younger brother; and friend over friend.

The classes in society were ordered on the Confucian idea of a hierarchy of worth: 1) scholars; 2) farmers; 3) artisans; 4) merchants; and 5) slaves. Although their position varied throughout Chinese history, soldiers were not even on the social scale, on the assumption that “nice boys don’t become soldiers.” By contrast, this attitude is very different in Japanese history where the samurai warriors became the highest, most venerated class. Confucianism placed great emphasis on an intellectual and landed elite and depreciated the value of anyone in commerce and manufacturing. Consequently, this system succeeded in creating a bifurcated social structure in which 80% were illiterate peasants and 20% landed upper class. There was almost no middle class.

The emperor received the mandate from heaven, an authorization from God to reign, but he ruled by right of his “virtue.” Thus if he were not virtuous, he could lose his mandate. The ruler was considered to be the son of heaven; his only superior was God.

The emperor was therefore held responsible for all calamities, and consequently, revolutions in China often occurred in times of famine or other hardships.

The emperor of the state was the father of society. The father in each family was the most important person and the family was the key social unit rather than the individual or the state. This was not true in Japan. Major characteristics of the Chinese family emphasized six things. 1) The group was important not the individual. 2) Youth was

339 subordinate to age. 3) Ancestor worship (or subordination of the living to the dead) was emphasized. 4) The wife was subordinate to the husband. 5) The daughter-in-law was subordinate to the mother-in-law. 6) Child-bearing, not love, was the reason for fixed marriages. Because of these strict relationships among people, Confucianism was based on ceremony and eventually became more form than substance. The Japanese succeeded in borrowing the ceremony but not the philosophy of Confucianism.

TAOISM (pronounced DAOISM)

The other important religious or philosophical movement in China was Taoism.

Taoism was based on writings, the Lao-Tze or Tao te ching, by a fabled Lao Tze and perhaps other writers, because it is really not known whether Lao Tze was a real person.

Taoism advocates the subordination of oneself to the ways of nature, for only in this manner it was thought, could an individual lead a meaningful life. The search of the

Taoist is to be in union with “Nature,” and, thus, to find the “Way,” or the “Tao.” The

Taoist must renounce the world.

Taoism is for the most part the opposite of Confucianism, romantic rather than matter of fact, intuitive rather than orderly, mystical and vague rather than rational. Yet many Chinese were both Confucian and Taoist. They were Confucian in times of peace and prosperity or when holding government office and Taoist during times of trouble or disorder or while at home in the country and enjoying nature.

A belief in Yin and Yang persisted from early times and was included in the philosophies of Confucianism and Taoism. Yin was positive, male, warm, active and represented by heaven, while Yang was negative, female, cold, wet, mysterious and

340 represented earth. These were two forces in the universe and were inseparable; therefore man and nature must be harmonious, and heaven and man were in partnership.

Buddhism was not introduced until the end of the classical period and at the beginning of the medieval period, around 500 A.D. Originally, Buddha lived around 500

B.C. in India. Buddha taught a life of simple, solitary asceticism in order to relieve the individual of all the suffering in this life, including death and thus one’s goal was to enter into Nirvana and end the Hindu concept of an endless cycle of birth, life, death and rebirth with endless suffering. However, as Buddhism migrated throughout Asia it was modified and was adapted and changed by the Chinese to include Confucian ethics,

Taoist beliefs, ancestor worship, a multitude of gods and a heaven and hell.

It is important to see that throughout this history that philosophies, traditions, and religions are not inert words or innocuous ways of doing things. What ever an individual or culture creates continues on through generations. Philosophies, traditions, and religions can and have become corporate strongholds in which real and powerful spiritual and demonic forces can take hold of minds and actually control them.

MEDIEVAL CIVILIZATION 500 – 1500 A.D.

One of the unique characteristics of Chinese history is its continuity. Although dynasties declined, decayed and were rebelled against from within and or attacked from without and finally overthrown, the basic characteristics of the Chinese way of life and government did not change. Although anarchy prevailed during the periods between the great dynasties, Chinese culture was not destroyed. Although barbarians invaded and conquered the land, Chinese philosophy, religion and language conquered them, and their

341 governments continued to be supported by Confucian doctrine, agricultural revenues, and forced labor. Although foreign migrations, and commerce came to China and foreign influence, material innovations, and discoveries were made, China remained essentially the same. During the medieval period the greatest influence from the outside world was

Buddhism which the Chinese quickly accepted and adapted to their own use. However, even Buddhism could not seriously challenge Confucianism or the structure of Chinese society. So although each dynasty during the medieval period varied in detail, in essence each was the same. The medieval era saw the revival of the one of the most unique aspects of the Chinese imperial government – the civil service examination. These exams served to keep the 20% of upper level people in power and position in a heavily bureaucratic system since the only people who could pass these exams had to be steeped in Confucian principles and history and Classical Chinese language. The peasant who labored all day from sun up to sun down had little time for studying. When Christianity entered China it remained a small but present witness throughout this period with the activity of the Nestorian (Syrian) Christians who worked amongst and along side of the

Confucian scholars around the throne.

In the Tang dynasty 618 –907, Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet were added to the map of China. Schools were established throughout China and the world’s first newspaper was printed. Japan was so impressed by this dynasty’s greatness that it borrowed wholesale from it, imitating everything it saw. Japan’s history as a nation begins in the 600’s A.D. The Sung dynasty, 960-1279, was famous for its porcelains and paintings, attempts to expand trade, introducing a better rice seed, and using gunpowder

(fireworks), and new printing techniques. In the Yuan dynasty, 1271-1368, Kubla Khan

342 established Mongol rule over China. Marco Polo observed China’s splendor as he and his brothers at first traveled on foot along the silk trail and they traded and presented

Christianity to the royal family. The Ming dynasty, 1368 – 1644, saw a renewed vitality in scholarship. Extraordinary sea voyages took place by Cheng Ho between 1405 –1433 to India, and the Middle East, and Africa. The first voyage had 62 ships and 28,000 men.

Yet rigidity and resistance to change by the emperors and the traditional hierarchy brought this kind of vitality to an end and caused the downfall of Chinese civilization as the West came to China.

CHINA’S DYNASTIES:

1. SHANG (1700-1100 BC): Flourished in Yellow River Valley. Writing and wheeled chariots were used in this barbaric civilization that also used human sacrifice.

2. CHOU (or ZHOU) (1100-256 B.C.): In the declining years Confucius, Mencius, and Lao Tze – China’s great sages emerged.

3. CHIN (QIN) (221-206 B.C.): China’s first unifying emperor, unified the kingdom and the languages, constructed the Great Wall and brought much reform by unprecedented brutal repression.

4. HAN (202 B.C. – 220 A.D.): Expanded the Empire, traded with Romans and foreigners and with Europe, the Middle East and South Asia during the time of Christ’s life on earth and the beginning of Christianity.

5. SIX DYNASTIES (220-589 A.D.): Mathematics, astronomy and horticulture were developed during troubled times and frequent governmental changes.

6. SUI (590-618): An improvement in the transportation network of roads and canals unified the country.

7. TANG (618-906) China’s military expanded the empire throughout Asia. Japan adopted its culture wholesale. Accounts of Japanese history begin during this time. China known as the “Middle Kingdom” was at its height in power and influence.

8. SUNG (960-1279): After many years of division and turmoil the empire was renewed and China’s great cities were built. The government improved and moveable type was first used.

343 9. YUAN (1279-1368): This was the age of the Mongol Empire that included China but also extended into what would become Russia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia to become the largest land empire ever.

10. MING (1368-1644): A return to Chinese rule brought prosperity and craftsmanship in art, architecture, and painting. Science and technology flourished.

11. MANCHU (QING): Manchurians from the north conquered and expanded the empire only to fall. This was a “foreign” dynasty because it was not Han Chinese but it too fell to foreigners from the West. This was the last dynasty and when it ended in 1911 it brought to an end 3,600 years of dynastic rule.

12. NATIONALISTS: (1911-1949): A republican democratic revolution overthrew the Manchu dynasty but it was too weak to withstand internal corruption, the Japanese invasion of World War II (1937-1945) and the Communist-Nationalist Civil War (1945-49).

13. COMMUNISTS: (1949-THE PRESENT): Communists closed the country to the world and attempted to construct a socialist-communist society. It failed but the Communist regime hangs on now by allowing capitalism. Mao tse-tung unified the country, the language (Mandarin), and required everyone to learn to read. These reforms helped Christianity to spread easily.

CHINA’S CHRISTIAN HISTORY

Ancient Chinese have creation and flood stories sewn into their language, tradition, literature and history.

Many Old Testament scholars believe that Isaiah 49:11-12 refers to China.

I will turn all my mountains into roads,

And my highways will be raised up

See they come from afar

Some from the north, some from the west

some from the region of Sinam.

The Chinese are believed to be descendants of Noah’s son Shem and they called themselves the Sine people. The Chinese word became Chin after the Ch’in emperor.

344 The criteria of Isaiah 49:11-12 are that the country must be east or south of Jerusalem; must be far from Jerusalem; and must be an important country to mention. China meets all these criteria.

At the time of Christ’s birth many believe that among the wise men who came to worship Jesus there were Chinese astrologers. Evidence for this is as follows. Ancient astrologers studied the stars for scientific and religious purposes as they used the stars to foretell things. The Chinese were using the compass a thousand years before Christ. At the time of Christ’s birth the Chinese had a clear map showing the route from China to the Mediterranean Sea. In 110 B.C. Cheung Ching made a trip from China to this area and charted the entire area and produced clear maps that are in existence today.

Astronomy was well developed and very accurate in China and this science advanced greatly between 500 B.C. and 200 B.C. The Chinese discovered a star before the time of

Christ that they called the “king” star. They believed that whenever this star appeared a king was born. Chinese history says it was at its most brilliant peak during the Han dynasty, the time of Christ’s birth and life. When Christianity first came to China the

Chinese called it the “King’s” religion. One wise man possibly was an astrologer named

Liu Sheng. When he was 70 years old he disappeared from China for over two years.

Thus, it is possible that these “wise men” left from Chang-on (Xian today), the capital city of China and followed the map and star for two years before arriving at Jerusalem.

After Christ’s life on earth and his crucifixion and ascension, it is thought that the apostle Thomas went to China, but there is no evidence of this. By 500 A.D. the

Nestorian or Syrian-Persian Christians (from where Syria and Iraq are today) broke with the Roman Catholic Church on matters doctrine and church governance. They could not

345 accept the doctrine of purgatory, or calling Mary "Mother of God.” A Persian bishop,

Alopen, went to China during the Tang dynasty in 645 A.D. He was received cordially by the Tang emperor. In three years the Nestorians translated the first Christian book into

Chinese. It was a portion of the Syrian scriptures up to that time before canonization of the Bible that taught about the life of Jesus. In that time Persian traders had learned

Chinese and lived in China and so it is thought Christians along with Zoroastrians, Jews and, after 700 A.D. Muslims, all had penetrated and influenced the China of that time.

Many Nestorian churches and monasteries were built and Nestorianism was the only

Christian Church in China for over 700 years. Most of their missionaries were well educated men and during the Mongol Empire they experienced their greatest period of expansion. The mother of the great conqueror Kublai Khan was a Nestorian Christian and thus the Mongols gave them positions of preference. However, by the time Roman

Catholics came to China, the Nestorians had disappeared. They had depended on the support of the existing government and when that government fell the new emperors were inclined to get rid of anything they did not like or considered foreign. In Xian, however, there is a stone tablet that relates the history of the Nestorians in China and thus there is evidence of their impact.

The two elder brothers of Marco Polo, Niccolo and Maffeo Polo, came to China and were received by the great Kubli Khan in 1262 A.D. They shared their faith and he was impressed. The great Khan challenged the Pope to send one hundred men learned in religion and the arts to his court. If they could prove the superiority of Christianity over other religions, then the Khan and all his subjects would be baptized. He promised there would be more Christians in his realm than all the rest of the world. However, no one

346 came to answer the challenge. The first Roman Catholic priest did not enter China until

1294, 32 years later, and Kublai Khan was dead and so was the opportunity.

The first Roman Catholic priest, John of Monte Corvino was favorably received by

Kublai’s successor but strongly opposed by the Nestorians. The Mongol court gave freedom to both the Eastern Orthodox and Syrian Christians and the Western Roman

Catholic Church. By 1306, approximately 6,000 were baptized in the Roman Catholic

Church. With the defeat of the Mongols, themselves foreigners, and the establishment of the more traditional Chinese Ming dynasty, both Christian communities were dispersed and formally made illegal. Only a silk-wrapped Latin Bible remains as evidence of the

Franciscan Catholic work in China in the 13th century.

Jesuit missionaries, Michele Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci, arrived in the Portuguese

Colony of Macau in 1579 A.D. They showed great wisdom in their approach to the

Chinese as they mastered the Chinese language and wrote the first Chinese book on

Catholic doctrines, The True Account of the Lord of Heaven in 1584. They had to adapt many new terms to express Christian concepts that are still in use today. At first they did not mention the papacy and hierarchy of the Catholic Church, lest it arouse opposition.

To mention the Pope would be like announcing the invasion of China by a foreign potentate that no Chinese Emperor or his officials could allow. However, the Jesuits allowed the Chinese Catholic converts to continue in ancestral worship. This caused much consternation in the Church. They also had a high level disagreement on the proper term for God. Eventually the organization of the Roman Catholic Church with its Pope, and its insistence on Western terms and forms came to the attention of the Emperor Kang

Hsi. On December 1720, he commanded that no westerner should preach in the Middle

347 Kingdom. He thus prohibited them from the empire to avoid further trouble. There was a mass exodus of Roman Catholic priests.

QUESTIONS: 1. What are the characteristics of Ancient Chinese civilization? When did it start and what was it like? 2. What was Classical Chinese civilization like? What was the important dynasty here? Who was Confucius and what did he teach and plant into Chinese civilization? 3. Define Taoism and Yin and Yang and Buddhism. What did these things put into Chinese civilization? 4. Name the succeeding dynasties and describe what happened in them right up until the present. 5. Describe what happened when Christianity entered China.

FURTHER READING:

Daniel H. Bays. Christianity in China: From the 18th Century to the Present. Stanford,

California: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Jonathan D. Spence. The Search for Modern China. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,

1990.

Jonathan D. Spence. God’s Chinese Son: The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom of Hong

Xiuquan. New York: Norton, 1996.

348 A SHORT CHRISTIAN MISSIONS HISTORY TO WORLD WAR I

Gary K. Pranger

Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I will be with you always, to the very end of the age.” Matthew 27: 18-20

Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. Mark 16: 15-16

The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem.

Luke 24:47

In 525 A.D., Dionysius Exiguus, an obscure Roman Catholic monk, began the dating system that is commonly used in the West today. He replaced the Roman system and centered all of history on Jesus Christ. The year 1 A.D. began when Jesus was born.

With the new dating system the account of Jesus and all history thereafter is dated to this day. Jesus lived to the year 33 when he died on a wooden, Roman cross. By this terrible and disgraceful death he drew all mankind to Himself as he showed God’s unconditional love in forgiving all of man’s sins and the sin nature that so deeply resides in fallen mankind. He rose and ascended into Heaven. Jesus Christ came into this world to redeem men and women for God, His Father and His kingdom and by the power of the

Holy Spirit, He gave them a job to do.

From the “actions” in the book of Acts written by a physician named Luke we see

Christian missions in action from Jerusalem with the Apostles and then outward with the

349 Apostle Paul and a number of early evangelists and in this way the Gospel of Jesus Christ spread. After the apostles were all martyred after the example of Christ, the Syrian,

North African, and Roman believers carried on the mission. Roman Christians were at the bottom of society and persecuted by Roman Caesars who felt threatened by “the new cult” or used Christianity as a convenient scapegoat to deflect the attention of the people away from their own misdeeds. However, early Christians found themselves as the predominant belief system by 500 A.D. Evidence is lacking for the extent of Christian success from the years 100 to 1450 A.D., though much is known. However, there is not room enough here to tell of all the adventures that we do know about in this period.

Suffice it to say that the Christian message has met with every kind of obstacle of unbelief, cruelty, and misunderstanding and that this history is full of tragic tales, seeming reversals, and overwhelming opposition. However, for those being saved, the

Gospel has never waned being impelled not by the desire of man but by the unconditional love and power of the Holy Spirit that no man can resist or thwart.

As concerns Europe and “the West” in our history of civilization, up to the year 1000

Europe was surrounded and interfused with dividing intrigues and murderous and rampaging barbarian tribes, such as; the Vikings, Huns, Mongols, Muslims and many others. Western Civilization, let alone, Christianity, did not look like it would survive let alone dominate. Prior to 1000 A.D. there were few Christians. Circumstances were very hard and sometimes brutal persecution and murders of missionaries and monks took place. But undaunted individuals and groups, such as St. Patrick, helped to convert many in Ireland, England and on Continental Europe. After the year 1000 Europe was largely

Christianized from Scandinavia to Italy, Ireland to Eastern Europe.

350 The Reformation that took place during the 1500’s became evangelically mission minded almost from the beginning. Luther’s northern Germany and Calvin’s Geneva drew many devotees and they became centers of Protestant Christian education for many

Europeans from Scandinavia to Austria and those from Scotland and England to Poland and Eastern Europe.

Riding the success of the explorations and circumnavigation of the globe in the

1400’s and 1500’s, Catholic and Protestant Christian missions increased as Portugal,

Spain, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Germany, France, and many other countries on the

Continent sent missionaries out along with their explorations, commercial ventures, and colonizing activities. Moreover, one might say that persecuted Christian groups from each of these countries became missionaries wherever they went. Spanish missionaries were looked down upon by their more secular colonizing armed forces. However, they established an extensive Roman Catholic presence throughout western and southwestern

North America, Mexico, Latin and South America by 1600. These Catholic missionaries, such as Bartolome de Las Casas (1474-1566), were for the most part defending and protecting the indigenous peoples from their brutal conquerors.

Except for Quebec, the French did not specialize in settlement colonies but sent explorers out to find commercially lucrative items, such as furs and tobacco to sell back in France. Along with the explorers and trappers went intrepid missionaries who then explored and spread the Christian message amongst the network of Indian tribes over much of North America and Canada prior to the existence of the United States. Jacque

Marquette (1637-75), a Jesuit missionary, Robert LaSalle (1643-87) and Father Louis

Joliet (1645-1700) explored the Great Lakes. They explored much of the North

351 American, and Canadian regions to the Great Lakes and then went down what became the Illinois River, and the Mississippi River. The French claimed all the land of what became known as the Louisiana Territory (named for Louis XIV) for both commercial and Christian goals.

Moravians from what is now Czech Republic predated Luther’s personal revival and during the Reformation migrated across Europe through Germany to the Netherlands to

England. They were sending missionaries to North America, India, Africa and other places before John and Charles Wesley decided to go to Georgia in the 1730’s. It will be remembered that it was in one of their meetings in London that the Wesley brothers were converted to Christ in 1738.

Puritans who were disaffected by British kings migrated to the Netherlands and to

North America where they intended to establish a base by which they could revive morbid British Christianity and be a light to all. Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries were in India, Southeast Asia, China and Japan by the early 1600’s with the Dutch and English following.

The First Great Awakening of the 1730’s in Europe and North America and the

Second Great Awakening in the early 1800’s sparked considerable Christian missionary activity. Home missions planted churches and spread the gospel throughout the continental United States as it grew and formed. Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians,

Congregationalists were the largest and most successful groups. However, smaller denominations and ethnic Christian missions groups such as the German and Dutch

Reformed missions worked in their respective communities. From 1800 to 1900 the

352 American Home Missionary Society planted Presbyterian and Congregational churches and worked to sew Christianity into the American fabric and in so doing saw many revivals take place where churches were planted. All the various denominations had their church planting missions. The Methodists and Baptists were the largest and most successful. Home and foreign missions societies were assisted by other organizations.

Bible and Tract societies worked to distribute the Scriptures as far and wide as possible.

In addition there were Christian organizations working to end slavery, take care of orphans and widows, prohibit the drinking of hard liquor and beer, and come to the aid of the urban poor.

American Christians today who believe that the United States was and is a Christian nation need to know that one could never assume that Americans would automatically be good, upstanding Christians and conservatives no matter what the founding fathers believed. Ministers, missionaries and every day Christians have had to work hard at almost every level in every decade and generation of our country’s existence. Indeed, a

Christian consensus was created along with the conservative, patriotic American fabric as churches were planted amongst peoples who were just as ignorant of the Gospel, and just as opposed to it, as any people in foreign lands. Moreover, rural settlement areas in

North America were not idyllic perfect places but could be as rough, crime ridden and full of bad, mad and sad people with many personal and family problems as in any community today. However, wherever true Christianity was planted integrity, common sense, self-improvement, law abiding, family oriented communities were established.

The power of Christ and the Holy Spirit cannot be underestimated in the work of creating a sane, safe, and for many a saved community as the United States came to be. It should

353 be noted that missionary historical scholarship has deduced that even when Christianity seems to have been at its best in a place and time - that one third of the population could be counted or construed as being saved – born again Christians.

The 1800’s was also the beginning of the heyday of Protestant Evangelical foreign missionaries from Great Britain and the United States going to Africa, Asia, and the

Middle East. In all these places Christian churches were planted and formed. As the

United States grew old denominations split, and new denominations and sects were formed. Some had good reasons, but many were simply formed because of personal, or prejudicial differences, power struggles, and differing beliefs over Biblical or theological issues, or issues involving the place of women in ministry, and many more issues. If they held to the centrality of the gospel and the all-sufficiency of Christ for salvation they were considered to still be part of the Christian heritage. If they added something to

Christ or subtracted from Christ they became not just sects, but cults. Cults that arise from Christian beginnings become different religions because they focus on something other than Christ. For instance, Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon became equals and added to the all sufficiency and authority of Christ and the Bible, and thus

Mormonism has been considered to be a cult by Protestant Christians. Mormons still believe that they must live up to a set of standards and that their own meritorious works must precede their salvation. Liberal people who considered themselves Christians usually deny the power of Christ and/or the Holy Spirit and His miracle working power and therefore Christ becomes human and not divine, such as Unitarians believe to this day. Here the all sufficiency of Christ is lost and they no longer believe in the need for a conversion experience. In the eyes of these people, cults and other religions and religious

354 founders can be seen as equals to Christ and Christianity. Thus, liberal Christians in the past and in whatever sect or denomination often are more in line with Deism, or the Post-

Modern beliefs in pluralism or pantheism than Christianity.

Worldwide Missions history is characterized by three words: Evangelical,

Pentecostal, and Women. Evangelical because the book of Acts never ended and as every person comes to a saving relationship with Christ, the Holy Spirit gives them a job to do in the “evangelization” and “discipleship” of those being saved out of the world.

Historically, usually only a third at best of the evangelical Christians have become active evangelizing or evangelical missionaries or mission minded at home or abroad in formal and informal ways.

The word “pentecostal” is stressed because as the Book of Acts has no proper end.

The acts, actions and work of the Holy Spirit has never ceased in His sewing and reaping work and in giving Christians gifts and doing miracles in and around those being saved.

The conversion experience is a unique miracle for every new believer. The word

Pentecostal in world missions history can be used as an adjective and not a noun until

Pentecostal churches began after 1900.

In the years 1899 and 1900 alone so much Christian activity took place around the world that it would take many books to tell it all. A small summary will have to suffice.

In 1900 Charles Parham experienced a baptism of the Holy Spirit along with a gift of tongues similar to the early believers in the book of Acts on the day of Pentecost. This meshed with much that the Holiness movement of Phoebe Palmer and others had experienced before this time in the late 1800’s. Later, William Seymour had a similar

355 experience and in Los Angeles started the Azuza Street ministry that saw the Holy Spirit work with all signs and wonders. Thus, the Pentecostal movement began and spawned many churches with this name.

Also in the in the year 1900, Tutor Jones, a Welsh historian, called for and prophesied that a revival would take place and the extensive Welsh revivals did take place with the preaching of Evan Roberts later in the decade. Around the world

Pentecostal revivals took place in Korea from 1903 to 1907, in Chile, and in Brazil. The year 1900 saw the Boxer Rebellion happen in China that killed many foreign missionaries. Hereafter, even more British, American and European Christians would volunteer to fill the ranks of the lost missionaries. Moreover, in China, in that same year the Holy Spirit worked wonders with Ki Li My in his work with the YMCA and Yo Go

Jin who started indigenous Chinese Churches that were totally self-supporting, establishing 100 congregations without foreign help. These churches would be the forerunners of such indigenous churches as the True Jesus Church, the Little Flock, and the Jesus Family that survived and multiplied despite World War II and the Japanese invasion and the Communist take over of China in 1949. John Nevius planted the Korean church in 1899 that would become so great in numbers later in the 20th century. In Africa the martyrdom of a bold Christian, Maziki, in the face of tribal and Muslim opposition did much to spread the gospel. Similarly, in Albania, Christians were murdered by

Muslims but they could not contain the gospel. In Russia the Orthodox Church was challenged. In India, Samuel Azariah who was 25 years old held a world day of prayer for India on December 3, 1899. He passed out a Tamil translation of a Charles G. Finney tract. He became the only Indian Anglican Bishop and saw 200,000 thousand receive

356 Christ in his ministry to the Dalits and Untouchables. In the Solomon Islands in the

South Pacific – 97% became Christians and Catholics by 1900.

In the United States, an ecumenical Christian conference in New York in 1899-1900 included John R. Mott who wrote a book on the spread of Evangelicalism around the world. William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt attended the conference and endorsed the proceedings. President McKinley is remembered to have gotten on his knees to pray for the Philippine Islands and that the United States would do the right things there. The

Gideons began distributing Bibles in 1900 in Janesville, Wisconsin beginning with 25. In

2005 they had given out 1.2 billion. D.L. Moody and R.A. Torrey both experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit in their time and are considered to have led another great awakening by the end of the century.

The third word concerning Christian missions in the world in the 1800s and at the turn of the century in 1900 is – “women.” Dana Robert has tells us that in the early years of World War I (1914-16) the percentage of global Protestant missionaries climbed to

44%. In the year 1900 – 57% of the nearly 6,000 American Protestant foreign missionaries were women. By 1916, there were 24,000 American Protestant missionaries and 62% of these were women. The presence of unmarried women along with missionary wives meant that missionary women outnumbered missionary men by nearly

2 to 1.

Dana Robert goes on to tell us that Christian women did not necessarily want to take the lead and become like secular feminists but voluntary associations of women and those within mission organizations were constricted by their missions to serve only women.

357 However, in many cases it simply became necessary for the women to preach, disciple, or do anything where there were no men. Women worked well in the regimented societies of Asia, China, and India. And actually the first churches established in India and China tended to be filled by indigenous men because the women would lose everything and perhaps their lives as well as their livelihood and families if they became Christians.

When women missionaries established homes for women and children, the women came out for Christ.

Ronda Anne Semple tells the story of the London Missionary Society that worked in

India; the Presbyterians of the Church of Scotland and its work in the Eastern Himalayan

Mission; and Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission schools at Chefoo, near Shanghai, from 1880 to 1910. Male dominated professionalism and Victorian respectability ruled all these missions explicitly or implicitly even as more and more women married or single came into the work. Home boards could be petty, pragmatic, career oriented and coldly indifferent to women missionaries and the Indians and Chinese they were called to serve. The more women entered the more roles were defined, controlled and thus the more enterprising or independent oriented were constrained or let go. However, in time the “natural” roles of compassion as partners, mothers, caretakers, teachers, semi- and formal medical helpers became the most effective part in doing the real work of God among the native peoples. The women were succeeding in showing Christ’s unconditional love. The women were getting the job done and the men were not.

However, the boards had no desire or understanding of using or letting these women minister in a more equal way on the field or letting them be recognized or promoted for having done so. The women disappear from the more public missionary literature.

358 The dilemma of Christianized Chinese, Indians and even North American Indians are similar in that the old Victorian missions that emphasized propriety, respectability and proper rules made them all have to conform to Western standards of dress, and manners before they were acceptable to Westerners. However, the prevalent racism of Western society still rejected them. And the new converts were rejected by their old homeland societies as well. Thus these western prejudices worked against the converted and converting at the turn of the century. Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission did much to break down many of these barriers but they could never quite overcome the man-woman barrier. Despite this God used women CIM missionaries in great ways.

Moreover, from this time in general two thirds of the active Christian missionaries throughout the twentieth century have been women. And on the mission field anything could happen and thus women have had to take on any role that God has assigned them to in the absence of male missionaries.

With all of this activity one can see that at the turn of the century there was a longing for the unimpeded presence of God. As Christianity leavened the lump there was a

“maturity” in “The West” and not just a desire for dominance and power over the rest of the world. Furthermore, even in this time Christianity needs to be seen as it always was in the context of world history – a multidirectional, multicultural and gender neutral movement run by the Holy Spirit that was unique and not a cultural invention of Western civilization to rule the world.

QUESTIONS: 1) What effects have Christ, the Holy Spirit and the witness of

Christians had on their world? 2) What movements or people stand out in this history? Why?

359 FURTHER READING:

David W. Bebbington. The Dominance of Evangelicalism: The Age of Spurgeon and

Moody. Downers Grove, Illinois, 2005.

Jessie Penn-Lewis with Evan Roberts. War on the Saints. The full text – unabridged

Ninth Edition. New York: Thomas E. Lowe, Ltd., 1994.

Mark A. Noll. The Rise of Evangelicalism: The Age of Edwards, Whitefield and the

Wesleys. Downers Grove, Illinois, 2004.

Dana L. Robert, Editor. Gospel Bearers, Gender Barriers. Maryknoll, New York:

Orbis Books, 2002.

Rhonda Anne Semple, Missionary Women: Gender, Professionalism and the

Victorian Idea of Christain Mssion. Suffolk, U.K.: Boydell Press, 2003.

360 ISM’S

Absolutism a government under a king, potentate, emperor or the like that is a law unto itself. There are no rivals or other parties who contend for the unlimited power of the king. The king or leader is a despot.

Agnosticism Person or persons who believe that the human mind cannot know whether there is a God or an ultimate cause, or anything beyond material phenomena. Agnostics or users of this word today are usually one step away from a true atheist as there is still some belief in God or the divine but only in a vague sense.

Arminianism A liberal Christian movement based on the doctrines of Jacob Arminius

(1560—1609), that stressed free will as opposed to Calvinistic predestination.

Atheism Atheists reject all religious belief and that there is any spiritual nature in man at all and they deny the existence of God or any invisible spiritual beings of any kind.

Authoritarianism A person or group that believes in, advocates, practices, or enforces unquestioning obedience, like that of a dictator, rather than allowing individual freedom of judgment and action.

Biblicism Biblicists take the words of the Bible literally. All born-again Christians believe the Bible to be God’s Word or the way God reveals and communicates about

Himself and His ways. However, some Christians take the scriptures too literally when many times they have, symbolic, or metaphorical or cultural meanings. Also some

Christians become biblicists when they make the Bible more important than God himself.

361 Thus, they are worshipping the Bible and not God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit who give the

Scriptures life and meaning as the “Word of God.”

Buddhism A religion and philosophical system founded in India in the 6th Century BC by Buddha. Buddha taught a life of simple, solitary self-denial and asceticism in order to relieve adherents of all suffering, including death. Thus one’s goal is to enter Nirvana and thus end the Hindu concept of an endless cycle of rebirth and suffering.

Calvinism The Christian doctrines of John Calvin and Protestants after him who stress the Scriptures that teach about God’s sovereignty, predestination, and salvation of the elect by the work of Jesus Christ and God’s grace alone.

Capitalism The economic system where the means of production and sales of goods and services by individuals, companies, factories, industries utilizing lands, railroads, stores, etc are privately owned and operated for profit under fully competitive conditions.

Catholicism The Roman Catholic Church’s doctrines, practices and organization growing out from its origins in Christianity which overturned Rome in the 6th century

A.D.

Classicism Ancient Greek and Roman culture, art, literature, architecture, philosophy, and science. Characteristics are formality, balance, simplicity, tolerance, law, rules, inductive and deductive thought.

Communism A system whereby the ownership of all property and the means of production are the property of the community as a whole. This was a hypothetical stage in the development of socialism towards its most glorious end posited by Marx and

362 developed by Lenin and others to be a classless and stateless society. A society that would have no police, no prisons, and no warfare, just the simple voluntarism and good will of people who will share and share alike and do this equally.

Confucianism System of Chinese philosophy and conservatism that teaches ethical, hierarchical values, propriety or li; that is, devotion and proper relations to authority, parents, family, friends, the living and the dead, and education of the mind and body, self-control, and humanitarian activities and diplomacy. Confucianism has also become a religion in that the image of Confucius is venerated along with ancestor worship.

Cosmopolitanism From the 18th century and the Enlightenment as high and middle class society became more urban and “worldly;” that is, knowing about, tolerating, enjoying the history, food, fads, fashions, literature, art, music, from all world cultures and thus creating an interest and knowledge about the world that went beyond national boundaries.

One became not just educated, but cultured or cosmopolitan and thus a “man or woman of the world.”

Creationism God created everything in the universe – all matter, all species, all times, all places, etc, including the souls and bodies of all men and women and the first man and woman, and a new soul for every man and woman born as well as individual physical characteristics. Christian scholars have divided over differing theories of creation. Most

Evangelical Christians believe that the literal Biblical account of creation can be scientifically verified. However, some Evangelical Christians believe in a literal 6 days of creation, and a short amount of time thereafter for all things. Others believe that creation covers a much longer duration of time and perhaps even incorporates various

363 aspects of evolutionary theory without contradicting the Biblical account. Still other

Christians believe that God used an evolutionary process throughout regardless of the

Biblical account.

Daoism (of Taoism) A Chinese religion and philosophy that seeks “The Tao” or the

Way of nature. A legendary and reclusive Lao Tse founded this religion and way of life based on withdrawing from society, meditation and contemplating the ways of nature and in essence becoming one with Nature. Over time this religion accumulated a pantheon of differing teachers and students, dabbled in the occult, and attempted to find ways to gain immortality. It also became an inseparable third part to the Chinese religious and philosophical character along with Confucianism and Buddhism.

Darwinism Charles Darwin theorized that all life – all species of plants and animals that included mankind - evolved from simpler forms by slight variations over long periods of time and through successive generations, and that natural selection determines what species will survive. Darwin and evolutionary scientists and believers to this day believe life began by a series of celestial, terrestrial, chemical, and biological accidents.

Deism Deists are 18th century rationalists and anyone who believes in God as a creative, moving force but who otherwise rejected formal religion and its doctrines of revelation, divine authority, Christ, salvation in Christ, supernatural relations, miracles, etc. Deists believe that by merely doing humanitarian good works and or trying to be good will get one into Heaven after death.

Democracy Government in which the people hold the ruling power either directly or through elected representatives; rule by the ruled.

364 Denominationalism Christianity since the Reformation in the 1500’s has divided into sects that hold to the doctrines and tenets of individual founders. Denominations have their own doctrinal statements, forms of worship, and systems of governance.

Despotism An absolute ruler; king with unlimited powers; autocrat run a political system, or state that is dominated by the despot.

Empiricism Scientific knowledge gained by experimentation and observation utilizing the senses and reason.

Evangelicalism 1) A movement of many diverse Christians from New Testament times and the Book of Acts onward that are actively involved or engaged in evangelism, witnessing, discipleship, and educating others in the Gospel of Jesus Christ and salvation by faith alone in Christ. Evangelical Christians believe in Christ as Savior, Lord, and soon coming King. 2) From the 1950’s on Protestant Christians who believed in

Christian academic freedom and more dialogue with the intellectual liberal and secular world broke with the more defensive minded Fundamentalists and they became known as

Evangelicals.

Expressionism An early 20th Century movement in art, literature, and drama, characterized by distortion of reality and the use of symbols, stylization, etc. to give objective expression to inner experience.

Fascism A system of government characterized by rigid one-party dictatorship, forcible suppression of opposition, private economic enterprise under centralized governmental control, a rabid nationalism, racism, and militarism. This system was instituted in Italy in

365 1922 by the Fascisti, an Italian political organization that seized power and set up a fascist dictatorship under Mussolini.

Feminism The principle and historical movement that holds that women should have political, economic, and social rights equal to those of men.

Fundamentalism Around the turn of the century American Protestant Christians fighting Darwinism and liberal doubts about the veracity of the Bible agreed on the

“Fundamentals” of the faith. The fundamentals were Christ’s incarnation and virgin birth, the atonement for mankind of Jesus Christ on the Cross, His resurrection, and His second coming. Biblical inerrancy and premillinialism also became important to

Fundamentalists who from the early 1900’s on became more defensive and more conservative against secular society and liberal Christianity.

Hinduism A wide ranging system of religion of the Hindus that has no founder and that is deeply interwoven into the beginnings and culture of India. It is characterized by the belief in reincarnation but its system is a syncretism over time of a combination of many beliefs and practices. Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Jainism are just a few of the belief systems that are related to and that have been added to Hinduism.

Humanism Any system of thought, or any intellectual movement based on the nature, interests, and ideals of man and especially those who believe in being secular

(nontheistic), modern (nonreligious) and in man’s self-fulfillment, ethical conduct, etc, without recourse to the supernatural.

366 Humanitarianism A person (a humanitarian) or movement or organization that is devoted to the welfare of humanity through the elimination of pain and suffering. An ethical doctrine that holds that humanity’s chief aim is to its welfare here and now. For some the humanitarianism doctrine includes the belief that human beings are capable of perfection without divine aid. For some active Christians today service or humanitarian aid is as important as presenting the gospel. However, all evangelical Christians who are trying to “love one’s neighbor” acknowledge that only the gospel enables the heart to change so that humanitarian service can really help.

Imperialism Policies and practices that form and maintain “empires” in seeking to control raw materials and world markets by conquest and the establishment of colonies, etc and/or to dominate the economic or political affairs of underdeveloped areas or weaker countries.

Impressionism Louis Leroy, a French art critic, first used the word in 1874 in criticism of a Monet painting entitled, “Impression, sunrise.” This was a movement in painting by

Monet, Renoir, Seurat, Pissarro, Manet, Sisley and more whose goal was to capture a momentary glimpse of a subject – especially to reproduce the changing effects of light.

The term was extended to literature (Stephen Crane, Virginia Wolf, etc) and to imagist poetry, and to music (Debussy, Ravel, etc) which sought to render and convey impressions and moods.

Industrialism A social and economic organization characterized by large industries, machine production, inventions, concentration of workers in cities, and many other infrastructure changes.

367 Liberalism 1) A political philosophy that advocates personal freedom for the individual, democratic forms of government, and reforms in political and social institutions. 2) In

Christianity it is a movement that advocates and allows many interpretations of the Bible, the Gospel and the nature of God and other religions and strives for freedom from orthodox and evangelical doctrines, constraints and authoritarianism, etc. Liberals or modernists from the 1920’s on saw God as imminent in civilization and history, that social action was more important than spreading the gospel, and that Christian progress was tied to the progress of civilization.

Marxism Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German social philosopher and economist who founded modern socialism and communism. Marx, Friedrich Engels, and their followers developed a unified system of thought and plan of action that predicted and worked for the fall or overthrow of modern industrialism, capitalism, and government and the eventual coming of a communist society where all would be equal in wealth and lifestyle.

Mercantilism (Colbertism) The economic interests of the nation, and the need for money for state purposes could be strengthened by government’s protection of home industries, through tariffs, by increased use of colonies, by foreign trade, through the use of monopolies, and by a balance of exports over imports, with a consequent accumulation of gold bullion.

Methodism John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield led an evangelical movement and revival throughout Great Britain and to the North American colonies.

They were dubbed “methodists” because their method was to regularly come together to study the Bible, pray, worship and celebrate communion. The Methodist message

368 emphasized salvation by faith in Christ and personal and social responsibility. Wesley also held to an ideal of Christian perfectionism that was influenced by Arminianism. The movement became the Methodist Church.

Monarchism Belief and advocacy of European and World Historical practice prior to the 20th century in a single or sole ruler of a state, and this leader, usually known as a king or queen, is usually chosen by hereditary and constitutional means; or by war.

Nationalism In history it is the desire for national independence and thus becomes a devotion to one’s nation by culture, language, religion, and customs. Nationalism is often characterized by patriotism, but can become excessive, narrow or chauvinistic.

Nationalists believe that the national security and interests are more important than international considerations.

Naturalism The belief that the natural world, as explained by Darwinian scientific theory, is all that exists and that there is no supernatural or spiritual creation, control or significance. All ethics, distinctions between good and bad, can be reduced to psychological, biological, and chemical traits and processes.

Neo-Classicism A 17th century revival of classical Greek and Roman style, form and thought in art, literature, architecture, etc.

Pantheism First coined in 1705 by John Toland, an English deist. Pantheism in Western thought is the doctrine that God is not a personality, but that all laws, forces, and manifestations in nature of the self-existing universe are all – God. However, the word,

“pan-theism” means many gods like the word polytheism. And in the primal religions of

369 native peoples in all of world religious history there is a belief in the supernatural manifestation of many gods, demons or spirits resident in the rocks, trees, hills, animals, mountains, air, sun, moon, stars, etc.

Pentecostalism Christians who relate to Pentecost, celebrating the descent of the Holy

Spirit upon the Apostles, by stressing the direct inspiration, the miracles and gifts of the

Holy Spirit in their lives; especially the baptism of the Holy Spirit and glossolalia.

Beyond the Pentecostal denominations, the word pentecostalism has become an adjective in Evangelical-missions history for the continued regenerative work of the Holy Spirit in the fulfilling of Christ's Great Commission. The gospel is to be preached and disciples made in all nations, tribes and tongues. Anything can happen on the mission field and it often has which simply continues the work of Christians from the time of the Book of

Acts in the Bible.

Protestantism The various Christian churches established as a result of the Reformation in the 1500’s who “protested” and became “protesters” against the Roman Catholic

Church and its policies of compromising the pure Gospel. Protestants believe that only by faith in Jesus Christ can one be saved and that Christ is all sufficient and that the Bible was, and is, the only authority in spiritual matters and it was for all to read. The Roman

Catholic Church had held that its people should believe in the Gospel and the Traditions of the Church and the Pope’s authority as equals in entering the Kingdom of God.

Catholics had gone so far as to assert that Christ’s salvation and one’s meritorious works were important for salvation.

370 Puritanism Protestants in England of whom many came to the American colonies in the

1600’s wanting the Church of England to purify itself of its formalism, the pomp and ceremony and the hierarchical nature of church governance from the king on down that still told the common Christian how to worship and what to believe. They also wanted the church to be stricter on governing morality and to teach ethics. Over time as Puritans separated from the Anglican Church they became Presbyterians, Congregationalists, and

Baptists.

Rationalism Rationalists believe that human reason can be the only determinant of one’s opinions or course of action. In philosophical terms the rationalist believes that knowledge comes from the mind or intellect without aid from the five senses.

Realism In literature and art nature or people are depicted as they really appear to be without idealizing. In philosophy, universal or abstract terms are objectively actual, and material objects exist in and of themselves, apart from the conscious mind.

Republicanism The general belief in a Republican form of government that holds that all of the citizens hold the supreme power of the state or nation. All citizens are entitled to vote for representatives and national leaders or presidents who are directly or indirectly elected by the citizens and responsible to them.

Romanticism A movement in art, music, poetry and literature that extolled and virtually worshipped “Nature” and the inner nature of mankind; individual feelings and the things of the heart; romantic ideas, the passions, the adventurous, the idealistic, the revolutionary, etc.

371 Scientism Science and the scientific methods and attitudes become most important and the belief that the scientific method should be applied to all fields of investigation.

Sectarianism In religious history, Christians have divided over individual differences, power, pride or authority issues or very small issues that become emotionally charged and go way beyond reasonableness (i.e., some of these issues are whether infants or adults should be baptized, the nature of communion, whether all Christians should read the Bible or not, whether miracles still happen or not, how and when creation began, or how and when the Lord’s second coming will happen) and thus sects or denominations are created and along with them colleges, seminaries, publications and books that celebrate and teach only a narrow or prejudiced point of view. Moreover, all religions in the world have sects or sectarian groups who believe different things but hold to the same religious system.

Secularism A worldly spirit, view or philosophy that rejects and disregards any form of religious faith or worship, or any suggestion that there is a spiritual side to man and the universe and believes that only this material world exists.

Socialism In Marxist theory, this is a stage of society that exists between the crumbling capitalist stage and the ideal communist stage where private ownership of the means of production and distribution has been eliminated. At this stage a government or leadership group of co-equals exists to educate and be an example to the masses of how the communist society is to operate. Once the ideal communist stage is in place the socialist leadership group or government will “wither away,” and there will be true equality and a fare share of everything for all.

372 Totalitarianism A government or state where a dictator, political party, or group maintains complete control over all aspects of life, societal movements, work and play and bans or eliminates all other rivals for power or control of the nation.

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